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“... my [i.e. Young’s] mistress!’ (Showing commendable restraint, this is the only exclamation mark that Young uses throughout his narrative – if nothing else, he is a man who knows how to punctuate.) Unsurprisingly, Elizabeth turns on Young, showering him with vicious emails and encouraging the rest of her husband’s staff to disown him. She also ...”

“... and it diminishes his stature among the grandees by showing that he needs them. John Heilemann and Mark Halperin in their absorbing history of the 2008 campaign, Race of a Lifetime, speak of Obama’s ‘million-dollar smile’.* It is indeed a great asset. His voice has proved not so sure a thing. It alters obviously and with discernible ...”

“... themes. O’Neill’s novel deserves to be read alongside Hollinghurst, the films of Derek Jarman, Mark Merlis’s American Studies and An Arrow’s Flight, Robert Glück’s Margery Kempe, Tony Kushner’s Angels in America and, above all, Neil Bartlett’s inexhaustible Who Was That Man? A Present for Mr Oscar Wilde as well as his more recent Mr Clive and Mr ...”

“... of excess. But, compared with Lord David Cecil’s A Portrait of Jane Austen (1979) and John Halperin’s The Life of Jane Austen (1984), the work under review is in so many ways the best that it deserves to make its mark. The three authors, moreover, approach their subject (or subjects) from quite different directions ...”

“... often to have indicated obscenity and buffoonery, lust, luck and fertility; others were used to mark senility (when pendulous), otherness (when circumcised) and self-control. They were a symbol as much for women as for men and figured in a number of women-only festivals in the form of phallic costumes and phallic cakes. Some care was taken to distinguish ...”

“... has to admit that the ‘pacifist’ passages are mostly not found in the earliest sources, Q and Mark, but points out that Q contains Jesus’s injunction to ‘turn the other cheek’. This is not necessarily a pacifist saying. Bonhoeffer was no doubt willing to turn his own cheek, but not that of millions of people who were being tortured and murdered by ...”

“... much considered. Generally, individual novels are preferred or not on idiosyncratic bases. John Halperin, for instance, offers Jane and Prudence as ‘arguably Pym’s best novel’ because it illustrates most powerfully his theme: her treatment of the war between the sexes. It ‘depicts women as the victims of men, of their selfishness and ...”