“... letters are peppered with references to them. When his wife gave him the unabridged journals of Sylvia Plath for Christmas 2000 – he had taught with Plath at Smith College – he found that she had a number of quite mean things to say about me … such as the claim that I have my hair ‘professionally ...”

“... sense of the anecdotal’ – that is where he belongs. From that early fabling phase, when Sylvia Plath heard about ‘a little wizard named Snatchcraftington, who looks like a stalk of rhubarb’, through Wodwo and Gaudete, Hughes has told tales compulsively, whether to us, his friends or himself. Many of his narratives are truly ...”

“... according to polls at the time, more than 70 per cent – wanted them to die. In her journals, Sylvia Plath wrote that the ‘appalling thing’ was the indifference all around her. ‘The largest emotional reaction over the United States will be a rather large, democratic, infinitely bored and casual and complacent yawn.’ In The Bell Jar, Esther ...”

“... Fascist sympathies. Similar acts of girlish ressentiment roil the works of Katherine Mansfield, Sylvia Plath, Daphne Du Maurier, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Jolley, Sybille Bedford and many others. Female autobiographers have been similarly forthright about such hatreds – if less so about the pleasures of posthumous retribution. When ...”

“... presenting only the words on the page.’ Veronica Forrest-Thomson has been trying to rescue Sylvia Plath’s ‘Purdah’ from the critics who think the poem is a straightforward confession of her desire to avenge herself on Ted Hughes. ‘Why she should have bothered to write poems if this was what she wanted to say is of course not ...”

“... love affairs and her exile – may take over from the poems. Her life is likely to rival that of Sylvia Plath as a subject for infinite fascination. It is vital to remember the power these poems had before the details of the poet’s life became public. Some letters are missing. Most of Bishop’s letters to Lota Costellat de Macedo Soares were ...”

“... craft or community ethos. A smart new haircut obviously isn’t art, if art is also Rembrandt and Sylvia Plath and Stockhausen. Not all art has to be dark or difficult or epic or anguished; as Eno said in his Turner Prize lecture in 1995, sometimes it can be clarifying to uncomplicate things. But this is all a bit too self-consciously feel-good – what ...”

“... say, what was on their minds’. The cast of characters includes Nietzsche, Cowper and John Clare; Sylvia Plath, Laing’s Mary Barnes and Freud’s Dora; Robert Schumann and Vaslav Nijinsky; and poor George III, in his declining years a living facsimile of Lear. There are also other, less familiar figures. There is, for instance, the remarkable Alexander ...”

“... and the frank titillations of style. Like other taboo-breaking writers – D.H. Lawrence and Sylvia Plath come to mind – Hutchins seems to have written for some fairly unpleasant emotional reasons, and the wish to mortify her nearest and dearest was no doubt among them. Such difficult wishing may be far more deeply implicated in artistic creation ...”

“... expected it,’ said his wife, putting on a shiny plastic apron emblazoned with a portrait of Sylvia Plath. ‘I expected it. Last time I went over he came to the door to wave me off. He’s never done that before. Bless him.’ She donned a pair of orange gauntlets and sinking to her knees before the oven gave the Shift a trial blast. ‘I think ...”

“... are sirens, naiads, fallen women who drown in watery graves. Some of this is reminiscent of early Plath – think ‘Virgin in a Tree’ meets ‘Lorelei’ – but any attempt to place Allen evades the challenge of her writing, softening the blow of its disturbances. The power of her poems inheres in the difficulty of knowing what to say about ...”

“... There was nobody new worth nurturing apart from the people we published in the early 1960s.Was Plath already out?Plath died in 1963, a year after the first issue of the Review; and we devoted a whole issue to her final poems and would certainly have printed poems by her. She’d already had a book of poems out and a ...”

“... the aesthetic imperative to ‘keep it real’ had also acquired an ethical dimension; in 1962 Sylvia Plath wrote ‘Daddy’: ‘I began to talk like a Jew./I think I may well be a Jew.’ If you had to write imaginative literature about your overbearing father, you now had to make him an engine chuffing you off ‘to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen’, at ...”

“... simply consist of being told what to do, for whatever reason, by anyone at all? Is it always like Sylvia Plath said: Daddy is ‘a man in black with a Meinkampf look’? In the last chapter, on Derrida’s Work of Mourning, one suddenly understands what Roudinesco’s book is about. It’s about the end of something: the end of a big adventure, and the ...”

“... go back a long way. They include Charlotte Brontë and stretch to Scott Joplin, Alan Turing, Sylvia Plath and Diane Arbus.On 26 June this year, the paper ran a belated obituary of Valerie Solanas, who died in 1988 and is famous for having shot Andy Warhol twenty years earlier. The year before the shooting, Solanas published the SCUM Manifesto, which ...”