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“... There are difficult decisions to make, moments when tempers get ruffled. But mainly it’s bliss, and we are tempted to sit back and admire the couple’s grace and luck and long years together. Well, we do admire these things, it would be foolish and unkind not to. But uninterrupted admiration can’t be good for anyone, and fortunately the letters ...”

“... drawn to people who lived at addresses with names such as ‘Inspiration Lane’ and ‘Bliss Road’. The project was covered by various media outlets, encouraging anyone who’d received a poem to come forward, but nobody did.Like all Ruefle’s work, The Book is partly about reading and writing. (‘Am I vain to think of my head as a book?’ she ...”

“... for corresponding with her brother the Kaiser: ‘a sad fate for someone whose whole idea of bliss had been to spend a week or two at Eastbourne’. His favourite was Queen Marie of Romania. She wrote the best of all royal memoirs and, remembering Disraeli, he used to murmur to her: ‘We historians, Ma’am ... ’ She once sent for him to her ...”

“... appear as united equals. The iconography is strewn with knots and yokes, images of connubial bliss and perfect union. ‘Each to the other equal,’ sings the motto, ‘stand Isabel and Ferdinand.’ The sources conspire to frustrate historians who want to distinguish the royal pair from each other, in terms of power and policy. The cosy image was a ...”

“... into the practices of Big Food (‘The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food’, by Michael Moss) shows the largest food conglomerates engaged in a ‘hyper-engineered, savagely marketed, addiction-creating battle for “stomach share”’. Forget the cupcakes: yoghurt and spaghetti sauces, packaged to look like healthy options, often have just ...”

“... a neutral holding zone, where the punishment consists in deprivation: sinners cannot share in the bliss of uniting with God in paradise. Such theological debates have a long history. In the third century, Origen, who castrated himself in the hope of frustrating temptation, kindly thought that, at the end of time, all God’s creatures would be saved. So ...”

“... in The Double, Kristeva became captivated, she says, by what she now calls the ‘irrefragable bliss of writing’. In 1963 the second edition of Bahktin’s Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics appeared in Russian, and Kristeva and her friend Tzvetan Stoyanov were able to ‘plunge again, Bakhtin’s book in hand, into the novels of Dostoevsky himself … I ...”

“... defines hell as deprivation of the sight of the face of God – which is to say, a memory of bliss and the knowledge of its loss. Similarly, The Master and Margarita suggests, the devil may be a figure of permanent, murderous revolt, the liege-lord of those who rebel (in vain) against the divine order, and who cannot accept the torment of their ...”

“... her of being out of touch with reality, her litigious skill far surpasses his. On the back flap of Michael Hofmann’s new edition, My First Wife is pitched as ‘a lightly fictionalised account of Wassermann’s own troubled marriage’. In 1898, Wassermann, a German Jew with a difficult childhood behind him (his father was a failed businessman who could ...”

“... in doing so to become no longer young. You can hear this in the most famous lines of The Prelude: Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven! I remember being woken to the rightness of their hyperbole when I found them misquoted in Paul Foot’s Red Shelley, where they become, even in ‘corrected’ editions, ...”

“... keepers of the flame, while pocketing the revenue for the estate, have no intention of satisfying. Michael Millgate has – quite fortuitously – written a book on exactly the same subject as Ian Hamilton, using the same case-study method. Whereas Hamilton burned his fingers trying to steal Salinger’s flame, Millgate – Hardy’s biographer and the editor ...”

“... am dying a death such as few mortals have enjoyed … exchanging earthly happiness for eternal bliss.’ Having sent their letters by express post, they picnicked on the banks of the Kleiner Wannsee, wrote each other love poems, drank wine, rum and, according to newspaper reports, ‘about sixteen cups of coffee’, before Kleist shot Vogel through the ...”

“... During her life she had published only three volumes of short stories: In a German Pension (1911), Bliss (1920) and The Garden Party (1922). But posthumously, under Murry’s supervision, she grew miraculously prolific. He brought out two more volumes, The Dove’s Nest (1923) and Something Childish (1924), which included unfinished fiction and brought her ...”

“... knew what it meant to manage to ignore them. He knew too that such practised ignorance is neither bliss nor denial but at times a virtue and at times a disaster. The trick is to know which times are ...”

“... advocate. My own hunch is that other Gurney personae usually written off as lunatic fictions – Michael Flood, Frederick Saxby, Valentine Fane, Griffiths Davies and so on: there were many – may yet turn out to be comrades from the trenches, those other persons he so loved. Although writing of place-names rather than people, P.J. Kavanagh puts the matter ...”