“... which is the true secret of her success and was obviously much stronger than her sense of power or money, or even of style and society. Her intelligence was all about sex; and she was sexually attractive all her life, with no recourse to being the sort of distanced, trumpeting social presence or demanding sacred monster that so many celebrated old ...”

“... singular eminence. He was almost kingly in status. His first cousins included two queens (Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard). He spent four years of his youth as the companion of Henry VIII’s illegitimate son Henry Fitzroy. Howard blood was blue enough to pose a threat to the succession, as Surrey’s uncle Thomas discovered when he was imprisoned in ...”

“... modern sauce. Charles may have been sexually, if unconsciously, attracted to his sister, Henriette-Anne, who was married to the sexually ambivalent brother of the French king. It is all beautifully told, with lively asides. We are informed that Charles’s alleged debauchery, as opposed to ‘sheer love of women’ and ‘great physical energy’, was not very ...”

“... the beginning, and all the waste in between.’Eyes betray contradictions and show the workings of power; they are both the gaze and the true, secret self. When Pecola goes to the store in town to buy some Mary Jane candies, Mr Yacobowski, who is white, looks at her with reluctance. ‘Somewhere between retina and object, between vision and view, his eyes draw ...”

“... And can love be said to have its own economy? In Economy of the Unlost and Autobiography of Red, Anne Carson has proposed answers to both these questions. Economy of the Unlost is a compact yet supple series of essays (first aired in the Martin Classical Lectures series delivered annually at Oberlin College) complementing her previous long essay on a ...”

“... armaments, but also discusses the human cost of warfare, its impact on the circulation of news, power-broking at court and the petty hierarchies of small country towns. Alexandra Walsham’s Generations: Age, Ancestry and Memory in the English Reformations explores what the religious changes of the 16th and 17th centuries meant for ...”

“... in traditional obscurity. The story of modern male fashion – and that is the core of Anne Hollander’s provocative book – begins, emblematically, with Beau Brummell, who wore the clothes rather than made them. His tailors were Schweitzer and Davidson in Cork Street, Meyer in Conduit Street and then Weston in Old Bond Street, ur-tailors ...”

“... Anne Harrington’s masterly account of homo duplex is more than just an account of the emergence of our understanding of our own inner dissymmetry. It sets the striving towards comprehension amid the social prejudices and pressures of the 19th century and shows how the expectations of the time moulded scientific opinion ...”

“... their irrelevance was a reflection of his indefeasible right of inheritance that no earthly power could abridge (this was the real subject of the True Lawe of Free Monarchies). On the political level, there were a number of explanations for James’s peaceful accession: Elizabeth’s refusal, despite her own distrust of James, to countenance any ...”

“... is only by making this effort that we can begin to appreciate the immensity of Bede’s creative power. There is a similar problem with the ninth century and the Viking invasions – the danger of seeing them as King Alfred and the writers of his court would have us see them. One approach here is to cut the Vikings down to size. This is the method associated ...”

“... that ‘the Oedipodeia rises gradually towards the light; the Oresteia is imbued with the power of darkness’ is a gross simplification of Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonnus, and simply inaccurate as a description of the end of the Eumenides. Here again, Green has been led astray by his obsession with ‘mirror relations’, the idea that opposite ...”

“... to Sybil, turned out to be ‘a fully-fledged lesbian’.) Edel’s campaign to persuade those in power to recognise his singular authority constituted its own kind of farce: a toxic combination of pettiness and dilatoriness that made him seem a version of the ‘publishing scoundrel’ in ‘The Aspern Papers’. In acting as an intermediary between ...”

“... insulated from the ironical comments about him’, yet he exercised his own tastemaking power with a certain irony – as when he bet Amy Lowell $100 that E.E. Cummings’s work would be seen as part of the canon by 2 June 1935. Thayer has remained a minor figure in the history of modernism partly because he did so little to promote himself. Before ...”

“... like to forge connections. It is striking to note, for instance – to take an example from Anne Hudson’s book – that Margery Kempe, about whose orthodoxy there was at least considerable doubt, had as her parish priest William Sawtry, the first man to be burnt to death for Lollardy. If the authorities who interrogated her had known that, they might ...”

“... popular biography of Thackeray we have had in the last nine years, taking its place alongside Anne Monsarrat’s Thackeray: Uneasy Victorian (1980) and Margaret Forster’s sprightly ‘autobiography’, Thackeray: Memoirs of a Victorian Gentleman (1978). (Rather meanly, Peters leaves both competitors out of her ‘Select Bibliography’.) All three ...”