“... than minor poets, he was, as often, lending his authority to a truism. Only once or twice, as with Anne Sexton, does Vendler haplessly show that a poet’s ‘whole’ reputation rests on next to nothing. Usually, as with Plath, she prints enough of what matters to configure a sensibility and vindicate her choice. Best of all, she gives us 16 pages of Charles ...”

“... stressed that Parshley should not be seen as the villain of the piece. A professor of zoology at Smith College, he was genuinely enthusiastic about Beauvoir’s book. It was the publisher, not Parshley, who insisted on cutting the text; in the end he cut 145 of the original 972 pages, or almost 15 per cent of the original. The strength of Parshley’s ...”

“... a year allowed himself to be lured away by Fortune. He soon grew restless there, too. He taught at Smith, SUNY-Stony Brook, Harvard, Black Mountain College, CUNY – yet none of them became a home. His New York apartment of longest tenure was a run-down sublet, to which he clung tenaciously. He moved in and out of the city. He lectured in Europe. He married ...”

“... slums.’The essays in this new volume have different views on Booth and his survey. Morgan and Anne Power, both of the LSE, salute him as the founding father of social science, the progenitor of socioeconomic modelling of poverty, and of the methods we use to show how modern cities work. Booth’s eight groupings, despite their moralistic ...”

“... early 19th-century Britain (the recently rediscovered diaries of Austen’s lesbian contemporary, Anne Lister, are an example) – one is struck not so much by the letters’ hastiness or triviality as by the passionate nature of the sibling bond they commemorate. Sororal or pseudo-sororal attachments are arguably the most immediately gratifying human ...”

“... diplomat, Helen DeWitt grew up in Mexico, Brazil, Colombia and Ecuador … She started a degree at Smith College and dropped out twice, the first time to read Proust and Eliot while working as a chambermaid, the second time to take the Oxford entrance exam … In 1988 she started her first novel. Over the next decade she started work on around fifty ...”

“... Moscow often commented on the exhaustive, repeated recitation of the tsar’s titles. For Thomas Smith in 1605 this was ‘ever their custom’. Miege, less patiently, described it as ‘troublesome and ridiculous’. And there is an element of absurdity even in Milton’s salutation, as though the list of fantastical-sounding lordships running from Moscow ...”

“... a Danish think tank, the Rockwool Foundation, reported on its investigations. Its team, led by Anne Frølich, found that Kaiser was better than the Danish health service at getting its constituent parts to work together, at getting patients to take responsibility for their own health and at preventing unnecessary hospital admissions. Everything was ...”

“... forgotten writer E.I. Lonoff. In that book Zuckerman comes to identify Amy, mistakenly, as Anne Frank, who has survived the camp and lives on unrecognised. In Exit Ghost she turns up again and is now revealed not as Anne Frank but as a survivor nevertheless, only from Norway not Holland. I had been reading this when ...”

“... of her as another woman.May got an opportunity to escape this straitjacket when Iain Duncan Smith made her party chairman in 2002, a decision that was widely seen at the time as smacking of desperation. She took advantage of the profile the role gave her to do two things that have helped shape her image ever since. For her first party conference as ...”

“... his power is clearly present in the scenes where he woos Katherine of France in Henry V and Lady Anne in the film of Richard III. (It may even be there in his night scenes with his army before Agincourt.) The strongest, because most casual, evidence I saw him give of knowing it was in The Master Builder at the National Theatre in 1964. As Joan Plowright’s ...”

“... the son of the author of Wind in the Willows?A. A nickname: Mouse.Tell the Bede story to Maggie Smith, who recalls some lines she had to sing in revue:Oh, I am the Venerable BedeI can scarcely write and just about read.18 February. Listening to the last movement of Elgar’s First Symphony I’m put in mind of some huge submerged mass coming to the ...”

“... a part. How often we read a beginner’s review that compares a thin thing to a fat one. ‘John Smith, like Tolstoy, is very interested in the way men interact under the conditions of battle.’ Well, no.It was this assumption of authority that allowed Hardwick to produce ‘The Decline of Book Reviewing’, and to deliver the swift and slashing put-downs ...”

“... never seen.3 May. A distressing call today from Dr C., the oncologist who looked after my friend Anne during her last illness. He talks about hospital services being deliberately run down and the difficulties of ward care due to shortage of staff but it’s only gradually I realise that what he wants is for me to try and write a play about it. I explain what ...”

“... undergoing a metamorphosis that prepared it for capitalism, rather than, like Marx and Adam Smith, seeing capitalism as growing organically out of technological advances and class conflict. Going against both Marxist orthodoxy and English aristocratic amour-propre, Brenner argues that once nobles became rentiers, they joined the bourgeoisie.This new ...”