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“... He soon ditched her; alone and poverty-stricken, she went insane and ended up in the Sainte-Anne psychiatric hospital. Since Breton was as keen on madness as he was on magic (its liberating potential is one of the principal themes of La Conception immaculée and of the essay on the art of the mad, ‘Art of the Insane: Freedom to Roam Abroad’), he ...”

“... she dedicated Reflections in a Golden Eye to her; here she is lying down in front of Katherine Anne Porter’s door at Yaddo; here she is hopelessly infatuated with a random ballerina she saw one night on stage. Here is Reeves entangled with various young women; here he is falling in love with David Diamond, a composer who was a shadow figure in their ...”

“... confession, a label often used to describe the work of Plath and her contemporary Anne Sexton) lead us, not just into the inner recesses of the poet’s thought, but through the veils, behind the closed doors of her past? Do we enter the room, see the knife slit the finger, catch the raised voices, watch the vase shatter, hear the baby ...”

“... life or literary criticism, to avoid the classic Sapphic double-bind: take the girls or take the jump. None of which is to say this isn’t an arresting book: the most penetrating on the poet since Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet (1987) and Joan DeJean’s Fictions of Sappho (1989). Prins’s immersion in the ...”

“... known’ Catherine of Aragon and so Henry’s first marriage was unlawful and he was free to marry Anne Boleyn (which he had already done in secret). Within a week, the busy new archbishop had also rammed the Restraint of Appeals Bill through both Houses of Parliament, despite the worries of MPs that Continental merchants would retaliate by slapping high ...”

“... Conscience, Watts’s Found Drowned, Augustus Egg’s three-part Past and Present, then a time jump to Sickert’s prostitute paintings (two of which are shown at the d’Orsay). The subject, when not off-limits, was morally corseted for the Victorians. Here, the opening rooms give us Manet, Lautrec and Degas at the height of their powers; Van Gogh and ...”

“... Mind Fixers: Psychiatry’s Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness, the historian Anne Harrington shows how much of Fromm-Reichmann’s renown came from her ‘willingness to do whatever it took to make an emotional connection with her severely disturbed patients. She would sit in their urine to show them she was no better than they were. She ...”

“... but never quite decides what it does seek to be. Judicious selections from Edward Taylor and Anne Bradstreet extend the anthology’s reach beyond what Ricks terms ‘our precious stones from Land’s End to John o’Groats, leave alone the emerald of Ireland’. On the other hand, the editorial policy excludes ‘the British Empire or the British ...”

“... He spends much of his time looking after Paulo, showing him the ropes, and setting him up with Anne, a young woman Bob had been too chivalrous, and perhaps too weary, to seduce himself. Even Commissaire Ledru describes him as a ‘friend’, though he fears, rightly, that he’ll have to arrest him again one day. ‘I don’t believe in ...”

“... Portillo’s visit as defence minister to Slovenia, Romania, Bulgaria and Macedonia in 1996, Anne Applebaum (coincidentally, for the Evening Standard) has a good old chuckle: Up and down the red carpets he walks, Her Majesty’s aircraft just behind him, the Macedonian defence minister just beside him, the Macedonian soldiers in front of him, looking ...”

“... coping with loss. It cannot simply be the tendency of American poets to drop dead in taxis, jump off bridges and gas themselves which makes so many pages in this anthology death-haunted. ‘Elegy,’ declares Coleridge, ‘is the form of poetry natural to the reflective mind.’ Even so consistent a writer as Mark Strand suffers from this bent. Half his ...”

“... and remorselessly conversational, sentences with no beginning and no end, and no place left to jump in and stop them’. Mary’s presence is no less insistent in Leavell’s book: every time you want to say something about Marianne, you find yourself confronted with her mother.Mary died in 1947; Marianne, worn down by years of anxiety on Mary’s ...”

“... nasty tactic’ (Melanie Phillips in the Daily Mail); ‘only the foolish want a new class war’ (Anne McElvoy in the Standard); ‘schoolboy jokes’ (Financial Times leader); ‘let’s fight about fairness not class’ (Observer leader); ‘there are progressive reasons, as well as obvious Tory ones, to regret this lurch’ (Julian Glover in the ...”

“... tale’s crackpot complexity.’ In other words, the age of the bestseller had arrived. If we jump forward a few years, to 2 September 1914, we encounter another tableau of literary life that is, in its way, no less striking than our Grub Street Cleopatra on her barge. As a junior member of the Cabinet with intellectual leanings, Charles Masterman had ...”

“... the aftermath, when the workforce decided to stay on strike – one was shot, the other forced to jump off a bridge, or some say a wall – but no one much remembers them. The mid-century revolutions in Europe were part of our history syllabus at school: we were learning about them around the time May ’68 kicked off. I was a 15-year-old with no political ...”