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“... he mused, turning sightless eyes on me (cataracts, he explained) and shaking his head in frank dubiety, ‘walking all the way to Eton.’ On a television in the pub beside the Bedfont Estate where we stopped for a Coke an hour later, Cameron was still at it. In the flock-heavy bar a circular vending rack offered drinkers – of whom there were none ...”

“... of the innumerable songs voiced by female speakers might actually have been composed by women? Anne Klinck’s Anthology of Ancient and Medieval Woman’s Song collects songs in the female voice; the repertoires extend from classical Greece and Rome through early medieval Ireland, Anglo-Saxon England, Scandinavia, and multicultural Spain to the more ...”

“... I haven’heard. He is Daron Aric Hagen, and Shining Brow is an opera about the early life of Frank Lloyd Wright, commissioned by Madison Opera, Wisconsin, Wright’s home state. The work was premièred there in April, but not having heard it, I cannot speak for the opera’s music. That, though, would not appear to be much of a drawback. Muldoon’s text ...”

“... forward and look round me at him, smile to herself and sit back again.’ When George’s daughter Anne was born in 1919 and son Michael in 1921, the sisters became enthusiastic babysitters and general chroniclers of their brother’s household. ‘I think George enjoys the thrill she gets when she gives her name in shops,’ Lolly wrote. ‘Mrs ...”

“... For his half-niece Anne Wharton, writing immediately after his death in 1680 at the age of 33, the poet Rochester was the guide who would have led her ‘right in wisdom’s way’: He civilised the rude and taught the young, Made fools grow wise, such artful music hung Upon his useful, kind, instructing tongue. Rochester’s modern editors and biographers are well aware of Wharton’s elegy, but they are not interested in the personage it describes ...”

“... that she was an American artist in the undomesticated tradition that includes Emily Dickinson and Frank Lloyd Wright, someone who made things in the risky artistic spirit that seeks personal sources and methods, programmatically refusing to begin by using what lies to hand. Her stage uses of the body, for example, eliminated the whole pictorial memory of ...”

“... crowd, it seems premature to proclaim a new era for Henry Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling. Tears, as Anne Vincent-Buffault suggests, have a rhetoric as well as a history, and shedding them while making war is not the same thing as weeping at the loss of a race – or even in defence of your wife, as Muskie did in 1972. Muskie’s tears were prompted by the ...”

“... of nine modern (mainly French) writers, and the sprawling Oxford anthology, edited by Frank Kermode and Anita Kermode, of 328 letters written in English between 1535 and 1985 by 175 different hands. But the contrast does not lie only in matters of format and genre. The difference goes to the heart of what a letter is. In a short introduction to ...”

“... carried the glamour and danger of scandal and shame, Dean and a local girl in her late teens, Anne-Marie, become lovers. The photographer, who narrates and, as he breaks off to explain to the reader, invents the details of Dean and Anne-Marie’s sexual journey, nonetheless frames the story in terms of his own ...”

“... as an actor by the age of 17.) Exactly the same view has even found a reductio ad absurdum, in Frank McGuinness’s bizarre new play, Mutabilitie, which was shown at the National Theatre recently: here, a delirious, burned-out Shakespeare, dropping in on Spenser near Cork in 1598, is overheard muttering Hail Marys by a prophetess in the local Irish ...”

“... a huge mirror capable of burning messages onto the Martian and Venusian deserts, while the will of Anne Goguet, a French socialite, left 100,000 francs to the Académie des sciences to be awarded to the first person to communicate successfully with aliens, with the proviso that they couldn’t be Martians, whose existence was already ‘sufficiently well ...”

“... Charlotte and Branwell, appointed themselves historians of the African empire of Angria; Emily and Anne broke away to chronicle the development of Gondal, a loose confederation of far-flung Pacific territories. Both teams put the stress on sexual and political intrigue: on seduction, betrayal, conspiracy, imprisonment, exile, violent death. Emily’s lengthy ...”

“... quarantine compounds within each major camp: 18,168 in one month at Bergen-Belsen – including Anne Frank – out of a population of around 45,000. In one last spasm the SS killed more Jews and high-value prisoners: foreign agents and German opponents of the regime like the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Some prisoners murdered one another out of the ...”

“... on, sustained by his mother’s favourite quotation (which stands as the novel’s epigraph): Anne Frank’s ‘In spite of everything, I still believe people are really good at heart.’ But, of course, Anne wrote that before the Germans got her. Thomas Keneally likes to run his fiction close to historical ...”

“... from one claw. Both scholars and creative writers have made much of Sappho’s fragmentariness. Anne Carson’s new translations, with facing Greek text, make effective use of blank space and brackets to convey the feeling of a torn or burned scrap of papyrus. Carson loves the spaces almost as much as the words: she says in her introduction that ‘brackets ...”