“... the bonus which distinguishes celebrity from fame? It depends on how you define perversion. There may be a link between shame and celebrity, but we know that there is a link between perversion and shame. Shame, or shaming, with its ostentatious morality, might be seen as a form of perversion in itself. Celebrity is often a ritual of public humiliation. Not ...”

“... Elizabeth Sweeting). His ‘marriage’ to Peter Pears, begun shortly after Mrs Britten’s death, may be partly understood in this light (Pears’s singing voice, it was noted, was uncannily similar to Mrs Britten’s), as may his lifelong willingness to be looked after, sometimes dominated, by a series of maternal ...”

“... It employed no reporters – news items were prepared from Reuter’s agency copy – until Richard Dimbleby, a reporter on Southampton’s evening newspaper, applied for a job with a bold letter suggesting that some members of the news staff might be called ‘BBC reporters or BBC correspondents’ and ‘held in readiness, just as are the evening ...”

“... office on 3 September proved to be, in Hunt’s words, a ‘dry hole’. Some months later, on 3 May 1972, on the orders of Colson, the White House arranged to fly some Cuban-American veterans of the Bay of Pigs to Washington from Miami. They were told that Ellsberg (now released on bail) would be attending an anti-war rally on the steps of the Capitol and ...”

“... of answered prayer. What a joy to hear from Mr Beggs of a £1,000 gift for the pulpit. Hallelujah! May that pulpit be the storm centre of the great hurricane of revival. Oh for a tempest of power, a veritable cyclone of blessing, Lord, let it come! Eight years later, the preacher rose up in that enormous pulpit and waved a copy of a historical study which had ...”

“... diver after all’s Done, still held fast in the weeds’ snare below ... My sudden struggle may have dragged down some White lily from the air – and now the fishes come. Meyers argues that the 20-year-old Frost chose the Dismal Swamp because other poets had written about it, and that Frost intended only to make a dramatic point to Elinor by ...”

“... bestseller with staying power. ‘Curious to think that a slender little volume about lunacy may provide a meal ticket for my superannuated years,’ Styron muses in Selected Letters, edited by his widow with R. Blakeslee Gilpin. The irony of Styron’s career is that as a literary son of Faulkner, Wolfe and Hemingway, he expended massive energy and ...”

“... on Victorian and modern literature are published now. The theoretical essays will come out next May. Born in 1928, Miller took his first degree in science. He converted to literature as a graduate and was steeped in New Criticism during its most doctrinaire phase. He describes his emancipation from its discipline as something comparable to Dorothea’s loss ...”

“... In a spirited attempt to forestall criticism, Margaret Doody warns her readers that they may ‘feel horrified at what they they regard as a changeling-substitution of a mad Gothic feminist for the cheerful little Augustan chatterbox’ which is the conventional picture of Fanny Burney. Stimulated to anger by past biographers who see Fanny Burney as sunny and shallow, ‘dear little Burney’, who class her with, but below, Jane Austen, who are interested only in Evelina and the Journals, Professor Doody sets out to present an altogether different version ...”

“... of this particular technique: ‘Sheet-lightning split the sky over London on the evening of 12 May 1907 and thunder rumbled long into the night. All day it had been sultry, the trees in Regent’s Park barely moving and a heat haze obscuring the new growth of leaves.’ There is almost a Bethlehem feel about this: a new light in the sky and various ...”

“... them was consistent with Frieda having no ‘reluctance ... to occupy the mothering position’ may not, if judgments are called for, be so easily agreed. My own feeling is that among those who care for these matters (and they are not exclusively censorious male oppressors, as here imagined) there is much less animus against Frieda than Jackson chooses to ...”

“... than Woolf. Her father was a housemaster at Harrow, and her education – highly privileged, as we may now think – was curiously similar to Woolf’s, for it was undertaken, more or less alone, in her father’s library. She was prodigiously literate and seems to have acquired the kind of social assurance that allows the possessor the privileges of candour ...”

“... idea of likening the French Revolution and particularly the Parisian mob to a parricidal monster may have occurred first to Edmund Burke. Already in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Burke saw the fomentors of revolutions as sinister magicians, the Parisian municipal army as ‘a species of political monster, which has always ended by ...”

“... other radicals: William Thompson, Francis Place, George Petrie, Thomas Spence, Robert Owen and Richard Carlile. In his day, Carlile was no less celebrated as a political agitator, and as a polemical atheist, than he was as a sexual reformer: some such mix of activities was the rule for this group. But it was Carlile’s sexual programme which was mainly ...”

“... and Vivaldi’s concertos, Scarlatti composed the same piece six hundred times. The pattern may be similar, the bipartite structure with its double bars and repeat marks may be the same. The content is never the same and rarely even similar. Handel is, of course, better-known than this. Or is he? The Water Music and ...”