“... both of them. S. is an epistolary novel, told in letters and tapes by Sarah Worth, who has left her stuffy East Coast doctor husband and gone to Arizona to join the Ashram Arhat, a religious community trying to build a permanent base for itself in the desert. (The portrayal of the ashram owes something to Frances Fitzgerald’s book Cities on a Hill and its ...”

“... of John Buchan by Gertrude Himmelfarb in an essay in Encounter in 1960, and Janet Adam Smith in her biography of 1965, the mud stuck. By the end of the Sixties in England, John Buchan was sinking towards oblivion, the sort of forgotten bestseller (like Phillips Oppenheim) you find in seaside rental bungalows, a footnote in the biographies of ...”

“... figures in the lesbian haut monde. A friend of mine once had dinner with Elizabeth Bishop and her lover. Another met Marguerite Yourcenar. At Yale in the 1980s one of Blakey’s best friends slept with – well, perhaps you can guess. (True – the closet case actress!) Someone else I know went to a party in a Chicago highrise and both Martina Navratilova ...”

“... the granddaughter of Henry II), Blanche was referred to by chroniclers as ‘the queen’ until her death in 1252, leaving the king’s wife, Margaret, to be described as ‘the young queen’. Blanche’s early regency was not, as far as we know, ever formally ended. When Louis went crusading in 1248 he made his mother regent again. Blanche’s background ...”

“... his suicide attempt. Genevieve only wants to help – and she seems gullible enough to assume that her charge only wants that himself. In an early meeting, she batters him with questions, and when he proves flippant and evasive, scolds him with a schoolmistress’s thin patience: ‘I am here to help you. You have to trust me. I am here because you need ...”

“... with manorial justice were practically routine. His mother’s name may have been Katherine, and her origins can be traced with some close detective work to the Meverell family of the Staffordshire Peaks. The mature Cromwell looked back to his own wild youth, ‘as he himself was wont oftentimes to declare unto Cranmer Archbishop of Canterbury, showing what ...”

“... dangerously ill with smallpox, ordering the privy council to appoint a successor in the event of her death. Elizabeth recovered, but it was still a revolutionary moment – the start of bureaucratic responsibility for the election of monarchs – and deeply revealing of the locations of Tudor power. In his next book, The Watchers, about the Elizabethan ...”

“... the Iliad are god-like, they are favoured by the gods and they resemble them in their beauty and majesty and strength: but whereas the gods live for ever and at ease, men cannot but suffer and die, and it is the gods’ will that they do so. It is for that very reason that they seek glory in battle, as the speeches of Glaucus in Iliad 6 or Sarpedon in Iliad ...”

“... including the reiterated ‘’ow you say?’ I suspect that Sir Angus never really got to hear her either. As the book proceeds, suspicions shift away from her, the baffling character, to him, the baffled creator. Audacious, even-handed, and good-naturedly witty in its mingling of historical facts and imaginative ...”

“... of Our Time, appeared in 1952. It was a bold debut because the young critic was committing lese-majesty against one of Germany’s most celebrated living writers. He subjected Jünger to a linguistic analysis clearly influenced by Wittgenstein’s methods, and the result was far more persuasive than the contemporary Marxist criticism, typified by Georg ...”

“... is obviously Laetitia Pilkington.’ Norma Clarke intends to vindicate both the author and her Memoirs (she pays tribute to A.C. Elias’s invaluable 1997 edition). Correcting the long-standing categorisation of Pilkington as a ‘scandalous memoirist’ (her story was advertised alongside Cleland’s Memoirs of a ...”

“... a paradise Sung with our fruited plains and spacious skies Praised with our purple mountains’ majesty ... ’ And so on till the air Filled with directors’ sobs. ‘We’re in,’ they cried, ‘we’re green, we really are.’ II High above town a first-growth wood Fanned out from a crease in the mountain Where waterfalls churned a mist like ...”

“... In June​ 1616 the Virginian princess Pocahontas arrived in Plymouth and travelled to London. With her came her husband, the English tobacco planter John Rolfe, and several members of her Native American family. Done up in embroidered silks and Flemish lace, she enjoyed – if that’s the right word – the adulation of the crowds and an audience with James I ...”

“... wonder; but to give Utterance to things inutterable, to paint, In dignity of language suitable The majesty of what I then beheld, Were past the power of man. No fabled Muse Could breathe into my soul such influence Of her seraphic nature, as to express Deeds inexpressible by loftiest rhyme. In these lines, Ricks finds ...”

“... expressive, like his drawing. But he soon adopts a defensive position, like a woman hiding her nakedness.’ Estrangements, the most painful those precipitated by the Dreyfus affair, marked his life. He was a conservative, acting according to ancient principle in a world which had forgotten honour and morality. He was a great attender at funerals and a ...”