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“... life in it to be ginger, and isn’t clean enough to be grey’.When Marlowe meets the journalist Anne Riordan, the nearest Chandler comes to creating a female character not entirely defined by her relationship to men, the first thing he says by way of conversation is to tell her what colour her hair is. ‘Your hair’s red,’ he says. ‘There are blondes ...”

“... December 1792, and it is significant that she took her father’s name – or something like it: Anne-Caroline Wordswodsth. Annette’s two surviving letters (confiscated by the French police in March 1793, and rediscovered in 1922) are garrulous, loving, illiterate, and plead again and again for her ‘cher Williams’ to come back soon and marry ...”

“... and his household, by the Republic of Gilead, and – more broadly – by the change in sexual power-relationships brought about by a catastrophic decline in the birth-rate. Earthquakes, nuclear pollution, Agent Orange, an AIDS epidemic and a new strain of venereal disease have combined to bring about a drastic reduction in human fertility (surely a ...”

“... the target’s target, the loved one’s love. I find a description of all this, surprisingly, in Anne Carson’s study of Greek lyric poetry, Eros the Bittersweet: Possibilities are projected onto a screen of what is actual and present by means of the poet’s tactic ... That godlike self, never known before, comes into focus and vanishes again in one quick ...”

“... than any of their owner’s paintings, which included Leonardo’s Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, to which it would probably be impossible to assign a monetary value today (the Mona Lisa is uninsured for just that reason). And tapestries –‘which seem today to enjoy about the same esteem as secondhand clothing’ – outclassed paintings in the ...”

“... achieved, as Bratton drily glosses, with ‘a simple code of conformity glorifying physical power, simplicity of speech and mind, softness of feeling, and self-satisfaction with the state not of manliness, but of being a boy’. Again, we must bear fashion in mind. These childish readers, when grown to rule the Empire, seemed to Santayana the sweetest ...”

“... Thus the eventual union of the kingdoms was an odd arrangement negotiated on behalf of Queen Anne as Queen of England with herself as Queen of Scotland. The conventional English understanding of the Union of 1707 is that Scotland was incorporated within the English state by Act of Parliament, and that, in the words of the chief guru of English ...”

“... waggoners and ostlers – company that certainly energised his writing. During the reign of Queen Anne, when he briefly walked the corridors of power, he looked in one view like a Whig in Ireland but a Tory in England, in another like a Whig in politics but a Tory in religion. Even these identities were unstable. A pamphlet ...”

“... cannot be escaped, a lesson she herself ascribed to the influence of Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power: ‘The mythical is not something “extra”; we live in myth and symbol all the time’ (Spectator, 7 September 1962). So the novelist is engaged in a half-paradoxical enterprise: she is to tell stories in order to free us from myth and magic. But free us ...”

“... rouge, the point of ‘stretching’ a short passage of dialogue, or a scene, was to heighten its power, and slow down time. Melville’s acts of ‘dilation’ sometimes seem superfluous, even perverse, only to acquire meaning later on, like the languorous shot in Le Cercle rouge of a barmaid handing a red rose to Corey, the robber played by Delon, just ...”

“... yourself and yet do not sound conceited’. In 1960, after reading some deeply personal poems by Anne Sexton (which were often compared to Lowell’s), she wrote to Lowell: ‘there is all the difference in the world, I’m afraid, between her kind of simplicity and that of Life Studies, her kind of egocentricity that is simply that, and yours that has been ...”

“... Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt and an obscure adviser to Oliver Cromwell, Eleanor responded with Anne Hutchinson (the martyred rebel against American Puritanism, accused of believing in free love), Harriet Beecher Stowe, Emily Dickinson and the suffragette leader, Carrie Chapman Catt. Feminist supporter of minority rights, Eleanor Roosevelt is our ...”

“... of referring to ‘Michelangelo Merisi from Caravaggio’ – ‘lived in a time of bureaucratic power, thought police and fearful conformism, in which arselickers and timeservers flourished.’ But his career also coincided with the establishment of the picture collection as a prestigious accessory almost equivalent, for the powerful prelate or banker in ...”

“... a new status in large parts of the world. But the current regimes in the US and Britain gained power by fomenting hatred of experts and expertise. British ministers, chosen for their devotion to Brexit and loyalty to Johnson, have revealed themselves as dangerous blunderers. Trump, still promoting family, flunkeys and conspiracy theories, has obliged his ...”

“... Elif Batuman, Edna Bonhomme, Hazel V. Carby, Linda Colley, Meehan Crist, Anne Enright, Lorna Finlayson, Lisa Hallgarten and Jayne Kavanagh, Sophie Lewis, Maureen N. McLane, Erin Maglaque, Gazelle Mba, Azadeh Moaveni, Toril Moi, Joanne O’Leary, Niela Orr, Lauren Oyler, Susan Pedersen, Jacqueline Rose, Madeleine Schwartz, Arianne Shahvisi, Sophie Smith, Rebecca Solnit, Alice Spawls, Amia Srinivasan, Chaohua Wang, Marina Warner, Bee Wilson, Emily Witt Elif BatumanWhen​ Roe v ...”