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“... through the hands of less enthusiastic publishers has been recorded in various gossip columns. Anne Smith, editor of the Literary Review, is a canny publicist for herself and her journal. Now, at last, we have this already much-read work to review. The Magic Glass is transparently a version of the author’s childhood, some thirty years ago in Fife ...”

“... Like many forceful Victorian women, Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon had a strong father and an obscure mother. Benjamin Smith, known in the family as ‘the Pater’, came from a formidable line of radical activists who had campaigned vigorously against the slave trade, and fostered projects for educational and political reform ...”

“... one he says is about me –                           by Stevie Smith (it’s called ‘Persephone’):                  I am that Persephone                  Who played with her darlings in Sicily                  Against a background of social security.                  Oh ...”

“... the male poets: they were among the poets that the male poets read. That Pope adapted a line from Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, when he wrote ‘Die of a rose in aromatic pain’ (Essay on Man) is constantly referred to in footnotes, but editors and critics have generally fought shy of considering the impact on Pope and other poets of his time of ...”

“... in Delphine, a novel set in France in the Revolutionary period. It was the first of two novels by Anne Louise Germaine, Baronne de Staël-Holstein, née Necker. Published in 1802 when its author was 36, it is at the same time a long fatal love story, a political drama, a historical novel, an Enlightenment apocalypse, and a female philosophe’s analysis of ...”

“... I met Anne Sexton six months before her suicide, in April 1974. My colleague Carol Smith and I were doing a series of interviews with women writers, and we had heard how Sexton and her friend Maxine Kumin had worked together for years, talking about their poems in long telephone sessions when neither of then could get out of the house ...”

“... below, he chats to his fellow journalists: ‘the pug-nosed, the pug-eared Morgan’, Davidson-Smith (‘overcoated’, ‘deerstalker-hatted’) and Freddie Fredericks, Frank Attercliffe’s aging and alcoholic mentor, and co-author with him of Pindar’s Weekend Round-up, a sports column on the Northern Post. After the match, in the Buckingham ...”

“... Who or Debrett (Henry VIII, 2nd s of Henry VII, qv, S 1509: m 1st, Catherine of Aragon; 2nd, Anne Boleyn; 3rd, Jane Seymour; 4th, Anne of Cleves; 5th, Catherine Howard; 6th, Catherine Parr etc). The authors have made their own compromise, which, as the price of retaining connected prose, offers a highly selective ...”

“... steel make such concerted use of the brilliant light effects inherent in its surface. Only David Smith has pursued them as diligently as Ray. The two men share a commitment to contingency as well as a medium: not just steel (itself an alloy of iron), but stainless steel in particular, another alloy, first produced in the early 20th century by adding chromium ...”

“... Danez Smith​ ’s prose poem ‘Dear White America’, published in Don’t Call Us Dead (2017), brought Allen Ginsberg’s ‘America’ into the present and gave it a more urgent register: ‘we did not build your prisons (though we did & we fill them too). we did not ask to be part of your America … i can’t stand your ground ...”

“... end it makes me think that the body was governing the mind. The rehearsal of all this is painful. Anne Stevenson, against the odds, has written a decent and intelligent book. It is certainly the best book on Sylvia Plath so far – and it isn’t graceless to point out that most of the earlier books have been conspicuously unsatisfactory. But Bitter Fame ...”

“... in its duties, private litigation was brought to secure compliance. When Ronald Reagan appointed Anne Gorsuch (mother of the newest Supreme Court justice, Neil Gorsuch) to head the EPA, he asked if she was willing to ‘bring it to its knees’. She slashed its budget and, as the New York Times put it, ‘sabotaged the agency’s enforcement effort’. In ...”

“... a painted-over figure, presumably a self-portrait. The order is thought to be, from left to right, Anne, Emily, Charlotte. Hassall compiled her scene from different sources: Patrick’s profile, with his distinctive high neckerchief (worn, we are told, because of his fear of bronchitis), was copied from a photograph taken late in his life, when all his ...”

“... that it was possible for people to redeem themselves by their own efforts. The followers of Mother Anne Lee, Joseph Smith and John Humphrey Noyes were all, in different ways, antinomian perfectionists who considered themselves free to challenge or abandon existing norms (particularly sexual ones) and to create new ones based ...”

“... Parsons and his wife were now seriously estranged. Mary blamed her husband for the death of Anne Smith’s two daughters, the grandchildren of William Pynchon. She also accused him of bewitching a cow belonging to Pynchon’s servant Francis Pepper. Another of Pynchon’s servants, Thomas Miller, cut his leg with a saw and immediately assumed that ...”