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“... was horrible or a great improvement on the present: all was grist to the political mill. Professor Fell is much too good a scholar to write with a political purpose, but this will not save her from being classed with the reactionaries. The message of this book is expressed at the end of the Introduction: ‘It is salutary to remember that scholarship does not ...”

“... remnants of English paganism, are among other themes eloquently handled. There is a fine essay by Christine Fell on Anglo-Saxon perceptions of transience, showing what is unique in the Old English elegies. In his discussion of the Old English ‘Genesis’ and ‘Exodus’ poems, Malcolm Godden gives fresh insights into the way a people recently ...”

“... James Graham-Campbell’s volumes, and James Graham-Campbell writes for David Wilson’s, while Christine Fell is, as it were, the religious affairs correspondent for each of them. Magnus Magnusson’s ‘book of the film’ is without even a foreword by David Wilson, and is pitched at a more popular and chatty level, but otherwise shares many features ...”

“... smart Indian couples and Rasta men, one of them carrying his son on his shoulders. At 7.30 a hush fell on the hall. The organiser gave a short, breathless speech; and then the crowd was up on its feet to watch Toni Morrison glide onto the stage. The audience applauded everything. They applauded when she announced that her son was in the room, and then the son ...”

“... intellect and gravity; he fluttered about among the latest fashions. When the French painters fell in love with Japanese prints, Whistler fell in love with them too, and slapped Japanese motifs all over his paintings, as Sickert observed: ‘Japanese fans were arranged on English shelves, and English ladies . . . were ...”

“... As before, teenagers gather on deckchairs on the Common on summer evenings and boys play ukuleles. Christine is a teenager, but far more sophisticated than Elsie. Her boyfriend, Leslie, who wears purple Oxfords, gets excited about the rumour of a brothel in Balham. ‘I was six months older than he and had read more. I said I had always imagined there might be ...”

“... Christine Brooke-Rose’s story of how this new book came to be is that she set out to write about her life, and instead produced a kind of antibiography. It’s described in the jacket’s blurb by Carcanet as ‘an autobiographical novel with a difference’ which ‘uses life material to compose a third-person fiction ...”

“... a leading role in the West End aged 15, and before long went to Hollywood. Back in England she fell ‘instantly’ in love with the 33-year-old film producer Anthony Havelock-Allan, marrying him three years later. They had two sons; the older one had Down’s syndrome and the other is a judge. She never criticised Havelock-Allan, but David, evidently ...”

“... If Christine Brooke-Rose had stayed in Oxford, instead of migrating to France, she might have been rather like Helen Gardner. Her new book is written with a crispness and a briskness which at once evokes a certain atmosphere: a highly intelligent unresponsiveness to theory, a fear of subjectivity (she even recalls, with obvious relish, her Oxford tutor’s phrase for mere criticism, ‘personal effusions ...”

“... he states, to benefit the second husband she would take after his death.* Other specimens include Christine de Pizan’s Treasure of the City of Ladies, Philippe de Mézières’s On the Virtue of the Sacrament of Marriage, a Middle English work called How the Good Wife Taught Her Daughter, and many more. The wife with the broken nose is typical of the ...”

“... Maria Theresa​ Walburga Amalia Christine, as she was baptised in Vienna in 1717, did not expect to become queen – or ‘female king’ (rex femina) as she was known in several of her many lands. After observing the ravages of the War of the Spanish Succession, Charles VI issued the Pragmatic Sanction, an edict which aimed to ensure that his (as yet unborn) children – even his daughters – would stand in line to inherit his kingdoms ...”

“... selfish reasons, coolly lies through his teeth, informing them that their ‘sweet little boy’ fell down as they were playing together. That his wrath springs from a very Charlotte-like contempt for the unwashed hordes around Haworth is confirmed by the provincial, distastefully plebeian quality of the dinner (roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, mashed ...”

“... He won Schumer’s congressional seat when Schumer ran for the Senate in 1998. In Washington he fell in line, and voted for the invasion of Iraq in 2002. He made a failed bid for the Democratic nomination for New York mayor in 2005, remembered mostly for a neighbourhood sanitation programme called ‘Weiner’s Cleaners’ (the name has now been scrubbed of ...”

“... party in Paris during the German occupation’ (Resistance party?), he became the lover of Christine, a young black woman who would end up a follower of Malcolm X. Monroe, it turned out, was the only white star who had ever interested Christine. In fact she identified with her: ‘She’s been hurt. She knows the ...”

“... fall outside her chosen century. As does the most famous exponent of exemplary feminist biography, Christine de Pizan, who rebutted male poets’ laments on female frailty, with her own City of Ladies which gave room to heroines from Circe to Deborah. Cazelles argues strongly that Christine did not insist on woman as victim ...”