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“... learned, un-showily stylish and at times moving in their tender intelligence, these essays by Anne Barton, ranging from a richly ‘mellow’ piece first published in 1953 – a period when even undergraduates wrote as if they were middle-aged – to the magnificent ‘Wrying a Little’, on Cymbeline, Jacobean marriage law and female desire, are ...”

“... was talking about the guy on the bus or the boys on the corner. They spoke instead about men in power, especially at work, the feeling that what was violated was not their body, but their gift. The men fired in America were men who sexualised their dominance. They used sex to spoil women’s ambition and soil their talent. You might even say they were using ...”

“... much by men as by women, and that shifts in the wider economy might produce shifts in bargaining power in the division of labour within households. Nor do they examine some of the implications of their assertion that, while more and more wives go out of the home to earn, their domestic and public status remains largely unaltered. They show that ...”

“... eloquent among themselves’. The story has two heroines, both called Kate, but Jacobs calls one Anne for clarity. His version is only two pages long in the 1968 Bodley Head edition. The telling moves off at a spanking pace: Once upon a time there was a king and a queen, as in many lands have been. The king had a daughter, ...”

“... old. When Henry died Cranmer had been his Archbishop for 13 years, through the rise and fall of Anne Boleyn and of Thomas Cromwell. It was Cranmer’s hand that Henry grasped at the last when his power of speech was gone to indicate the confirmation of his assured Christian belief. Legend has it that Cranmer grew the ...”

“... in Delphine, a novel set in France in the Revolutionary period. It was the first of two novels by Anne Louise Germaine, Baronne de Staël-Holstein, née Necker. Published in 1802 when its author was 36, it is at the same time a long fatal love story, a political drama, a historical novel, an Enlightenment apocalypse, and a female philosophe’s analysis of ...”

“... there was too much rainbow and not enough granite in her being. The missing granite is provided by Anne Lindell, Violet’s self-portrait in Broderie anglaise, no longer a character cloaked in legend like Sasha, a mirage disappearing into the distance. Far from being a ravishingly beautiful woman, she ‘wasn’t even pretty’. ‘Her features were ...”

“... overnight showed up on all the walls of my life inscribed simpliciter no explanation. What is the power of the unexplained. There he was one day (new town) in a hayfield outside my school standing under a black umbrella in a raw picking wind. I never asked how he got there a distance of maybe three hundred miles. To ask would break some rule. Have you ever ...”

“... usual ironic manner,said, ‘Alkibiades darling,you’re no fool after allif you see in me some power to make you better.It must be a kind of beauty vastly different than your own,a rare kind, an extraordinary kind –so what you’re proposingis an exchange of beauty for beauty?Now is that a fair deal? Your beauty for mine? Alleged for true?Sounds like the ...”

“... of music: but it compromises all life’s homely rituals, and it can’t comfort him. The power of form is manifest in the incomprehensible garments of the officials in The Trial, whose badges and straps and buckled flaps are the more terrifying to Joseph K. because they seem to have a significance out of his mind’s reach. Joseph K. himself begins ...”

“... familiar. Between 1963 and 1970, she had been treated three times a week by a psychoanalyst named Anne Darquier, to whom she had become very close, and who had probably committed suicide. Were they related? They were, and for more than three decades Callil, conscious of a need to discharge a debt as both a patient and a friend, pursued Darquier, Vichy’s ...”

“... Anne Serre​ was ten when her mother died in 1971. She claims to have no memory of the preceding years. ‘My father sank into a depression,’ she told the White Review in 2020, ‘and my sisters and I … tried with all our might – like all children in this type of situation, I think – to protect him, resuscitate him ...”

“... and salute. The Ceausescus divided Romania into his ’n’ hers, like bath towels, his nuclear power plant, her petrochemicals factory – they treated it like their living-room. In an interior decoration jag, Elena Ceausescu ordered that all the net curtains in Romania be taken down. She said it was because she wanted ‘a transparent society’. It is ...”

“... Literary criticism seems to be putting on weight in its old age – Margaret Anne Doody’s book is well over three hundred thousand words and loaded with learning, which may appal the fainthearted, but they should take into account that throughout its length it is written with verve and wit, and is by any standard an extraordinary and idiosyncratic achievement ...”

“... for Manhattan Beach just after 9/11. ‘It made me think about the trajectory of American global power,’ she told the New York Times, ‘and wonder about the future of that trajectory, but also, wonder about the past of it: World War Two.’ So what does Manhattan Beach tell us about this? For Anna, the isolated people she sees while walking round the city ...”