“... Plantin?) who, so we learn, successfully traced his ancestry straight back to the Virgin Mary. (‘One imagines some pretty murky areas around, say, the third century,’ somebody comments.) Despite the presence of a bewildering array of men and their variously sized and angled organalia in Edward Manners’s gay bar-coded sensibility, young ...”

“... habits. Hill illustrates a painting very much in this taste, depicting the Duchesse de Berry as Mary, Queen of Scots, sailing to exile in Scotland after the July Revolution of 1830. ‘Marie-Caroline, Duchesse de Berry’ by an unknown artist (c.1830). She also documents the many ways in which, on this side of the Channel, the medieval was employed to ...”

“... have been partly shaped by his early vulnerability. After one youthful snub, from another cousin, Mary Chaworth, he avoided putting himself again into a position where he needed to trust a woman’s sincerity. (The women in his poems do not establish any hold over the heroes – who are haunted figures, but driven by some internal demon, never by the power of ...”

“... John Wieners​ once told his nephew he had met the Virgin Mary. ‘Did she say anything to you?’ Walter asked. ‘No,’ John said, ‘she doesn’t know how to speak.’ He paused. ‘But she’s learning.’ Wieners was born to a working-class family outside Boston in 1934, educated by Jesuits, and spent formative periods of his youth in New York, San Francisco and Black Mountain, North Carolina ...”

“... Aki did indeed come home with him: but once there he was temporarily reconciled with his wife Mary, and no more was said about divorce, at least not for a while. Aki was installed in a room in London and set to work on Leigh Hunt in the British Museum, where her researches were to be a great help over the years. She settled down stoically enough in her ...”

“... fan and pendant vaulting of the Lady Chapel, Elizabeth I is buried on top of her sister, Bloody Mary, who put her in the Tower of London. Mary, Queen of Scots, whom Elizabeth had executed, lies (head, of course, separated from body) in her own tomb, almost exactly opposite Elizabeth’s; ...”

“... dwarf railway engineer’, and, more disturbing to Vinnie, the pubescent Camden Town schoolgirl Mary Mahoney, a punk goblin who demands payment before she will recite her obscene playground rhymes. Not only is this variety of tone a relief: it operates cunningly as the objective correlative of the psychic drama inside Vinnie Miner-Minor’s head, as she ...”

“... to get off with George Moore – or so he said. “George Moore would have said that of the Virgin Mary,” said B.B. [Berenson], “if he’d ever heard of her.” ’ But is it witty or humorous to predicate that George Moore hadn’t heard of the Virgin Mary? Like self-love, ill will is a busy prompter but not much of an ...”

“... the Blake of the Visions of the Daughters of Albion may justifiably be claimed as a sister to Mary Wollstonecraft in the struggle to vindicate the rights of woman. And, most alarmingly in a book that advertises itself as a guide to the poetry as well as the life, it completely misses the point of the poem, which is that the cabinet is by no means a ...”

“... was that of an educated man of the world who had read Marx and Freud rather than R.W. Chapman and Mary Lascelles, and it proposed an alternative both to the old-style Brahmins and to the new-style technocrats of American graduate schools. Edmund Wilson, who in his maturity became a more pugnacious personality than Trilling ever was, maintained a steady and ...”

“... then abandoned) during the same horror-writing game at the Villa Diodati house party at which Mary Godwin conceived Frankenstein, Byron’s friends found the episode infuriating. John Cam Hobhouse recorded his vexation: I have got into a correspondence with Polidori about ‘The Vampyre’, which he wrote and got vamped up, and then attributed to Lord ...”

“... in Dublin in 1729, the second son of Richard, a Protestant lawyer of ‘fretful temper’, and Mary, daughter of a Catholic family from County Cork. Richard Burke was a harsh and unforgiving father, and rumours about cradle Catholicism dogged Edmund throughout his life. His was a complicated inheritance. He spoke with an Irish brogue and as a child ...”

“... Europe to Britain reverses the route that Lionel Verney takes to escape a plague-ridden Britain in Mary Shelley’s proto-SF novel The Last Man. It’s unlikely that the echo is accidental: the Gothic is another genre that Glavinic happily borrows from. On his second night in Britain, Jonas makes it as far as Lancaster before he falls asleep. He wakes in ...”

“... Lady Ottoline Morrell, Lady Cynthia Asquith, the Honourable Dorothy Brett, Catherine Carswell, Mary Cannan, Amy Lowell and, later, Mabel (Dodge Sterne) Luhan. He accepted their money (Frieda was not above writing begging letters), their offers of houses and their hospitality, which to a couple on as low an income as theirs was a godsend. In return Lawrence ...”

“... in a slyly intense ‘spiritual history of the suburbs’ which posits, of mundane Mary and the otherworldly angel, that ‘the closer the two figures appear to be, the more the mystery between them deepens.’ For the suburbs too are haunted, by ‘scavenger angels’, their genius loci a child always ‘out to play’ and at night ... an ...”