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“... proof of self-mastery, spirit triumphant over the flesh: they slew the body and called it freedom. Barbara Gates’s fine study of Victorian suicide, taken as the harbinger of what Hardy called ‘the coming universal wish not to live’, ironically opens with the self-slaughter of one of the Revolution’s most implacable foes, Lord Castlereagh. And ...”

“... One of the qualities of polysyndeton, on the other hand, is to suggest emotion beating at the gates of restraint’ – if this is true, the most interesting question is why? The last three chapters change again in tone, having much more the character of a handbook, despite the strongly personal, and thus valuable, quality of some of the last ...”

“... of an old woman savouring for the last time the poignancy of her past. Like Minnie McMahon in The Gates, and Nancy Gulliver in The Old Jest, the central character of this novel is 19 years old, all playfulness and charm, and utterly unprepared for tragedy, despite the state of the country and its implications for her future. The cast assembled by the author ...”

“... by their parents in industrial disputes, as, for instance, by stationing pickets at the school gates and organising marches and demonstrations. Having nailed his colours to the Marxian mast Humphries resolutely stands by them. But things get difficult when we come face to face with the goings-on of some young men who are no longer subject to the supposedly ...”

“... place you glimpsed from the top of a bus passing along the Embankment. Not many got through its gates – one director, at least, took pleasure in turning away grand amateur gardeners. Now it is open to the public (Wednesday and Sunday afternoons). It is still an important botanical resource, but no longer a training ground for apprentice apothecaries, as ...”

“... spread across both the playfield and the backglass, while the game’s bumpers, rollovers, gates and so on are customised to fit in with the theme. In ‘Bram Stoker’s Dracula’, the silver ball hurtles along dark, stone-flagged corridors and up cobwebbed ramps, bounces off battlements and disappears from time to time into catacombs. An odd feature ...”

“... in the middle, Mamouse, the large lady caretaker who sits ‘like the dog Cerberus’ at the gates of hell, watching over her pourboires and her pot of simmering chicken-giblet broth. Prickly’s chief aim in life is to sneak past Mamouse into the Ladies, where behind closed doors, and without having to stand up (a position which inhibits him), he can ...”

“... thugs. This suspicion isn’t confined to the black poor, either, as Obama’s friend Henry Louis Gates discovered when he was arrested while trying to get into his own house, after a phone call to the police from a white bystander. America has undergone a significant racial transformation since the 1960s, but it has bred both black affluence and an even more ...”

“... Henry VI. Warwick ‘the kingmaker’ proposes to replace the head of York, savagely set on the gates of the city by Margaret, with that of Clifford: From off the gates of Yorke fetch down the head, Your Father’s head, which Clifford placed there: In stead whereof, let this supply the roome, Measure for measure must be ...”

“... Eliot (Michael Caine) contrives to cross paths on a Manhattan street with his sister-in-law. Lee (Barbara Hershey), with whom he has fallen in love. He pretends to be hunting for a bookshop: she shows him the way to it and there he finds, as if by chance, E.E. Cummings’s Collected Poems, which he insists on buying for her. Putting her into a taxi he tells ...”

“... confidence, sometimes shading into condescension. He imitates Olson’s magisterial mode, telling Barbara Guest: ‘There is not enough. I have gone over them three times after receiving them & now again – different … I want more. Maybe this cannot be. That you are not structured such.’ He advises Jimmy Schuyler ‘to develop all you can yr ...”

“... assorted mob from the wider Labour movement: a constellation of leftist Bevanite MPs including Barbara Castle, accompanied by MPs from the pro-American right of the party and assorted trade unionists (some of them ‘allegedly quite ignorant freeloaders’, as Wright puts it, others equally ignorant fellow-travellers, and a few who remained shrewd and ...”

“... last traditionalist Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Fisher of Lambeth, retired in 1961 the flood-gates of reform immediately opened. Even the time-honoured episcopal uniform of frock-coat and gaiters vanished along with him, as the old order made way for a new, informal one. The allegation against the Church, made by its critics, was that it had sacrificed ...”

“... to forget to look at the narrowest house, the smallest shadow. The closed shops with their rolling gates of iron.’ Of her hometown, whose location is never made clear, we are told: ‘You could hardly make out its radiant and peaceful moistness that on certain mornings would come from the mist and emerge from the nostrils of the horses – the radiant ...”

“... widow allowed Annie to mix with women of radical ideas and public ambition: Florence Nightingale, Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, Bessie Rayner Parkes, Emily Davies. Her feminist instincts took shape in such company. She began to take a part in public affairs, presenting evidence on the education of girls to the Taunton Commission, established in 1864 to ...”