“... of her talents on the stage. He worked closely with Elizabeth Gaskell and the philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts. The distress of abused and vulnerable women moved him to pity, and he made energetic attempts to lift prostitutes out of wretchedness, with Burdett-Coutts’s help. He couldn’t tolerate women defying his authority, but he was bored by ...”

“... family imploded. Her mother fell ill with TB, her father delegated home life to the 14-year-old John and chaos ensued. In some ways it was liberating, as Boty recalled in the long interview she gave in 1965 to Nell Dunn for her book Talking to Women. With her mother in hospital or at home bedridden there was ‘a fantastic amount of freedom’, but there ...”

“... Cry (a Moorcock favourite), through his love for his cousin Rosie and his spiky relationship with John Barbican Begg, developer and despoiler, global media tycoon. Revelations, betrayals, shifts of fortune, seductions, conspiracies, keep the fingers flicking over the pages. Dead on cue, after some cunningly weighted rhetorical passage, a jibe at ‘Pretty ...”

“... In​ 1975 Angela Carter published a withering review of a star-studded production of Die Walküre, staged in the Roman amphitheatre at Orange. The classical setting was not Norse-friendly; the acoustics were horrible; the evening temperatures plummeted; and the wind wreaked havoc on the singers’ voices (Carter thought it was ‘probably blowing directly from Israel ...”

“... classical material (Quintus of Smyrna) and at her own academic specialism, Elizabethan literature (John Lyly gives Helen a scar on her chin – the equivalent of the flaw in a Ming vase that perfects it). The book opens with the Iliad and closes with Derek Walcott’s novel-like epic poem Omeros, in which Helen is a servant in the house of Major and Mrs ...”

“... of her blows is shaped in large part by her chosen sparring partners: Aristotle, Kant, Mill, Marx, John Rawls, Amartya Sen, Catharine MacKinnon, Andrea Dworkin, Susan Moller Okin. Though some of the nudging she gives feminists – typically referred to in Sex and Social Justice as ‘them’ but in the more recent Women and Human Development as ‘my fellow ...”

“... three short, pictorial essays about three dope-fiend authors, Thomas de Quincey, Marcel Schwob and John Keats. The essays are clearly the product of much reading – Jaeggy has translated Schwob’s Vies imaginaires and De Quincey’s Last Days of Immanuel Kant into Italian – though it’s the reading not of a scholar but an artist, interested only in what ...”

“... connections that can entail. He has Westminster experience as a parliamentary researcher, but to John McDonnell; his parents were Militant activists and his politics are rooted in a Trotskyist version of Labourism, yet he has managed to force a neoliberal Labour establishment to take him seriously. His opinions would be ridiculed as those of a ...”

“... designed and marketed male style from Playboy to Carnaby Street. Alistair O’Neill’s article on John Stephen, ‘The King of Carnaby Street’, for example, shows how Stephen successfully adapted a gay style to the mass heterosexual menswear market in the 1960s. Indeed, men’s clothing choices in general seem to produce a wider range of ambiguous ...”

“... gossip. (I once passed on a piece of gossip which caused Karl to look up from his desk and say: ‘John, your ear is so close to the ground, it’s coming out in Australia.’ I didn’t mind the zinger, but thought Mary-Kay and Susannah had no need to laugh quite as much as they did.) He was particularly interested in the Spanner trial, in which a group of ...”

“... and Star Trek enthusiast called TCP ‘Germy’ Hinton on the Oxford leg, passing by the grave of John Dee, Elizabeth I’s court wizard, an allegorical theme-park called Milton Keynes and other centres of deep and magical significance, as they go. Why are they doing this? Because they have been sent on a quixotic chase after a texte de fétiche, a putative ...”

“... funny on their own terms, and not on the terms of a knowing modern readership. An author like Angela Brazil, who signals no gap at all between herself and the wilder absurdities of her stories, lays herself open to the attentions of humorists. Kenneth Grahame went on to write The Wind in the Willows, in which some riverside animals, fitted out with ...”

“... would dissolve into a haze of signifiers. Not all of this would be music to the ears of, say, John Fiske, whose essay ‘Opening the Hallway’ upbraids the maestro for coming down too hard on Michel Foucault. Hall has been engaged for some time in a precarious balancing-act between socialism and Post-Modernism, class and race, epistemic realism and ...”

“... interests. Authors who drew most attention to their own form and language – novelists such as John Berger, Doris Lessing, or Rushdie himself; poets such as J.H. Prynne – were in this way among the most politically committed in the period. Stevenson’s prejudices are strongly aired in his chapters on poetry. He is less at ease discussing verse than he ...”

“... London – to which superstar American CEOs were lured with the promise of an audience with Elton John and the king in St Paul’s Cathedral (proof, apparently, that Britain is ‘open for business’, or more plausibly that desperate times call for desperate measures) – Starmer switched to a clumsier metaphor. ‘We are in the business of building on our ...”