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“... Ann Douglas’s The Feminisation of American Culture, first published in 1977, now appears in Britain at the same moment as its long-delayed successor, Terrible Honesty. Looking back at the earlier book, Douglas remarks that her ‘excavation and re-evaluation of American feminine 19th-century literature’ has been continued by many other historians, mostly women, who have rebelled against what she calls, in tones more civil than those of some of her successors, a literary canon consisting ‘of almost exclusively male-authored, conspicuously shaped and achieved works ...”

“... imitating Susan Sontag); and, eventually, in the feminist academy (where her Princeton colleague Ann Douglas – ‘a rebel, a genius, a flash of light’ in a ‘green Diane Von Furstenberg wrap-dress’ – became an idol). Heroine-worship, in other words, is a real Showalter thing – and in this she is typical of the women she celebrates, all of ...”

“... of love. Here is the female narrator of Mating, a graduate student in anthropology called Karen Ann (as we learn when we glimpse her as a married woman in Mortals), describing her future husband, Nelson Denoon, who has sunk into a mood of diffuse apology: Then he confessed for the second time that he regretted giving me the impression when we were ...”

“... by jealousy. What most upset the ever polite Englishman was the effrontery of his arch-rival, Douglas Cooper. Penrose’s letters to Picasso mentioning Cooper are not always entirely truthful: from time to time, as Cowling puts it, ‘personal animosity got in the way of strict accuracy.’ Cooper didn’t tell the truth either. Angry at not having been ...”

“... Literature, and this is exhilarating. The child and troublesome parent of Anywhere but here, Ann and her mother Adele, combine their struggle between generations with that classic American experience of migration westward to the better land: in this case, a move from the Midwest to California, where Adele hopes to turn ...”

“... he blindfolds his psychological faculty and misses the simple reversal of genders in the play. Ann Whitefield, driven to unscrupulous lengths by the Life Force in order to secure the best father for her future children, is Shaw driven by the same Force to the unscrupulous and unsocialist length of marrying a ‘millionairess’ in order to secure the ...”

“... his probably quite numerous affairs, particularly his long relationship with Ian Fleming’s wife, Ann – certainly the Gaitskells often dined with one or both Flemings, making one wonder quite what the mutual understandings were. Ann Fleming was a wealthy Tory – she had been married to Lord Rothermere – and while there ...”

“... were more in his line than the activities of the Land League. Like Yeats, Lady Gregory and Douglas Hyde, he brooded over the ‘spirit of the nation’ and thought it would be a fine thing to express it in a theatre, but he didn’t want to see it manifested in a rough form. Maud Gonne was too rough. Yeats had to hover about her interests, because he ...”

“... before he went ‘my negro woman slave … Fanny, together with her two mulatto children Ann and Joseph’. He had already married the daughter of a prosperous New England planter. On returning to England in 1791 an inheritance from an uncle allowed him to invest in plantations across the Caribbean. He became a significant ship owner, banker and ...”

“... it might indeed make good 20th-century sense to worship food, but punters of ‘foodism’ (as Ann Barr and Paul Levy jokily dub this phenomenon) are evidently not about to drop to their knees because they are starving.‘Foodies’, according to Barr and Levy, are ‘children of the consumer boom’ who consider ‘food to be an art, on a level with ...”

“... son Henry seem, paradoxically, to have been inherited from a mother who was illiterate. Born Mary Ann Ball, the eldest child of a large family that had migrated from Tipton to Birmingham, she could not be spared from her labours at home during what should have been her schooldays, and when, in her late middle age, her granddaughter tried, unsuccessfully, to ...”

“... and Janice Galloway’s Foreign Parts. It bridges writing as different as the poetry of Carol Ann Duffy, Kate Clanchy or David Kinloch, and the fiction of Christopher Whyte or A.L. Kennedy. Some of these poets and novelists are wary of each other. Jamie recently refused to read with Irvine Welsh because of what she saw as the misogyny of one of his short ...”

“... believe that it is, in fact, a variant painted by Poussin himself (see the article on it by Ann Tzeutschler Lurie in the Burlington Magazine for November 1982). As to the comment on Blunt, it has of course considerable irony. Perhaps I should have been more insistent about seeing the manuscript. Perhaps the lesson to be learned is that the Dreyfus ...”

“... seat with space for visitors to have their pictures taken sitting alongside her bronze replica. Douglas Brinkley’s Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory is the first serious biography of Parks. It is also part of a new series of brief lives of famous individuals written by authors not previously known for expertise on the subjects of their books. Brevity and the ...”

“... learning and tones to write about working-class life in Leeds (he also uses straight dialect); Douglas Dunn does it when he writes in Northlight with Marvellian decorum about Tayport; Les Murray when he writes about Bunyah. Use of proper names (where’s Tayport? where’s Bunyah? where’s Glanmore?), confidently deployed local allusions, the belief ...”