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“... among other places – suggest affirmative answers. Two notable studies have appeared recently: Marilyn Butler’s Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries, reviewed in the LRB (Vol. 3, No 21) by Christopher Ricks; and Thomas McFarland’s marvellously over-the-top Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin, which also appeared in 1981. (One might commend, en ...”

“... but not spoken of. Most English novelists fit neatly enough with this Romantic prejudice. When Marilyn Butler published a book some years ago called Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, the very title was fighting talk: ideas, in the mannerly Austen? Charles Dickens is nowhere more unregenerately English than in his genial philistinism, allergic to ...”

“... tended to see the 1831 version as a tamer, more conservative work. In her edition of the 1818 text Marilyn Butler traced the ways in which the 1831 version retreats from the earlier text’s troubling associations with controversial aspects of contemporary science and adds a more orthodox Christian moral dimension to Frankenstein’s outlook. Whereas ...”

“... are subject to political debate. But in English literary culture since the Romantic period, as Marilyn Butler has shown, there has been an opposing tendency, a reaction against Enlightenment values and a tendency to exalt the inner, authentic world of the imagination against a political world considered to be irredeemably fallen and inauthentic. Few ...”

“... Jane Austen. When An Unsuitable Attachment, posthumously published, was reviewed in this journal Marilyn Butler devoted her analysis to the thesis that the novelist was not the anti-feminist old-men’s-darling that she pretended to be, but was really, under the influence of modern anthropology, purposively producing ‘Functionalist’ or essentially ...”

“... there are no new intimate life-materials. Therefore context – as revealed in recent work by Marilyn Butler, Nicholas Roe and others – is amplified: we are reminded of the radical enthusiasms of the Enfield school, and the scientific empiricism of Guy’s Hospital, with the promise that context will reveal a different, or at least a ...”

“... who was not immune to the charm of historical inevitability, thought Kehama marvellous and (as Marilyn Butler has observed) several times borrowed from Thalaba the central device of a boat leading a protagonist inexorably downstream towards an appointed destiny. Newman outdid even Shelley in admiration, acclaiming Thalaba as ‘the most Sublime of ...”

“... written about their favourite critical subjects, such as Christopher Ricks on Tennyson or Marilyn Butler on Jane Austen. There are one or two notable absences among historians who have written principally on British topics – nothing from Linda Colley or Quentin Skinner, for example – and some of the best-known contemporary exponents of ...”

“... fluid dynamic of an extended family. In her own family, both Jane and her sister Cassandra, as Marilyn Butler has pointed out, ‘played a key role as travellers between the households [of their brothers] and assiduous correspondents … Jane somewhat closer to and more preoccupied with two of the younger brothers – Henry, said to have been her ...”

“... something you don’t really care about. So the books keep coming. They’re still writing about Marilyn and Princess Grace: why, after only ten years, wouldn’t we be deluged with books about Diana? It’s just, you know, the way the world is. Diana, as the first narrator of her own yarn, seemed to understand that stories have their own needs and immutable ...”

“... bills into a shredder in order to disguise their provenance in the empire of – Howard Hughes? Marilyn Monroe fucked both Kennedy brothers before taking her own life, if she did indeed take it. Frank Sinatra raised money for the Reagans and acted as at least a confidante to the First Lady. Norman Podhoretz’s son-in-law Elliott Abrams, while working as ...”

“... 1997) and Desire & Duty: A Sequel to Jane Austen’s ‘Pride and Prejudice’ (Ted Bader and Marilyn Bader, 1997) have appeared in print. The further adventures of Isabella Thorpe, Mrs Rushworth and even the family of Mr Collins; the events of Pride and Prejudice told from Mr Darcy’s point of view; the events of Mansfield Park as seen by a ...”

“... standing as a poet has been doubtful or negligible. This is a position firmly summarised in Marilyn Butler’s handbook, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries (1981). She argues that the only Coleridge to pause over is the man whose ‘really significant or at least influential career was as a moulder of opinion’ – that is, as a political ...”

“... the talking foetus in Blonde, so long as you regard it as a horror film rather than a biopic of Marilyn Monroe). I’ve read many, many descriptions of legal and illegal abortions in novels and medical literature and online testimonies, and in the end, I started dreaming them. For a while I had an abortion every night.It was a kind of research – into ...”