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“... the end of the performance, I was in tears (and so, incidentally, was my companion that afternoon, Philip Larkin, who admired her poems but who had, I think, never met her). The ‘hey-ho’ was in fact part of the tears. One merit of Frances Spalding’s excellent critical biography is that it helps to restore to Stevie Smith her dignity. Her earlier ...”

“... about Shippey’s book is the sympathy he brings to the Medieval literature upon which Tolkien drew, mounting to a brisk enthusiasm when, for example, Shippey explains how Tolkien reworked features of Old English poetry to spell out to modern readers things that an Anglo-Saxon would have known instinctively. But what is depressing about The Road to ...”

“... a dark green and set on a concrete plinth, marking the centre of another world. Five households drew water from it. Women came and went, came rattling between empty enamel buckets, went evenly away, weighed down by silent water. The horses came home to it in those first lengthening evenings of spring, and in a single draught emptied one bucket and then ...”

“... in school room and another in larder, but nothing seen of poor Sally.’ From an early age she drew compulsively and documented her animals living and dead. She was attached to them, but not sentimental. When pets died, or were chloroformed to put an end to their suffering, they were boiled down so that she and Bertie could draw the skeletons. This was ...”

“... of John Aubrey’s 17th-century writing. ‘My great Uncle … remembred him,’ Aubrey wrote of Philip Sidney, dead for three generations, ‘and sayd that he was wont, as he was hunting on our pleasant plaines, to take his Table booke out … and write downe his notions as they came into his head when he was writing his Arcadia.’ Searching for memories ...”

“... but rather to what he calls the ‘master-slave dialectic’. Viewed in this way, cuissage drew on a metaphorical language of sexual possession to underscore the threat of domination, and pretended to enact an ‘erotics of inequality’. More specifically, it articulated a discourse of seigniorial privilege which was part of a system of power and was ...”

“... Much of this is standard Neoplatonist stuff, by no means unique to Berkeley; it’s just that he drew some startling epistemological consequences from it. There had always been a certain aversion to materialism in Irish thought, and Berkeley simply presses it to a logical if implausible end-point, abolishing matter altogether. What replaces ...”

“... Collected Poems (reprinted here as an appendix), his neat-minded friend Walter de la Mare drew attention to Thomas’s ‘loose-woven’ style, a wonderful epithet which simultaneously conjures up the Thomas of tweeds, pipes and trousers tucked in socks, and his verse, written in a form both ‘fixed and free’, which enacts Thomas’s encounters ...”

“... in the New York Times, ‘Jewish writers – Bernard Malamud, J.D. Salinger, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, inter alia – have emerged as a dominant movement in our literature. Herzog, in several senses, is the great pay-off book of that movement. It is a masterpiece, the first the movement has produced.’ Herzog not only had critics whirling their ...”

“... Jolting miserably over the rough terrain, he began to wail. This – the thing I describe – drew a crowd. For his plight grew worse, yet his shouts were in a foreign language, desperately begging his ‘master’s mercy’. His funny way of talking made them laugh. His bodily contours, his fat suggested something alien, animal, Babylonian, gross. So the ...”

“... of its unconstitutionality but from Jacobite treason. By the same token, his Lord Chief Justice, Philip Hardwicke, was more concerned to link a crime wave in the 1730s with ‘the degeneracy of the present times, fruitful in the inventions of wickedness’, than with widespread human want and desperation. And there is an almost comical petulance in one ...”

“... from 1554 depicts Mary in the throes of this phantom pregnancy, shortly after her marriage to Philip II. The queen is shown seated rather than standing, in the tradition of portraits of Habsburg brides, and the partlet concealing her shoulders and neck follows the conservative fashion of contemporary Spain. She is 37. What’s striking is her ...”

“... the subliminal exhortations warned of in Vance Packard’s 1957 book, The Hidden Persuaders, which drew attention to the use of mass psychology in advertising, public relations and political campaigning? The fear that returning Korean War POWs had been mentally compromised (many were sent to an Army facility in Valley Forge for an extensive series of ...”

“... had already acquired fanciful names. Schiaparelli’s was a better map than any before, and he drew his names from the classics. He also saw features on the planet that he termed canali, or ‘channels’. He refused to decide whether they were natural or artificial, but his disciple, the American astronomer Percival Lowell, was in no doubt. Alone among ...”

“... of Titian’s friend and public-relations manager, Pietro Aretino, and his greatest patron, King Philip of Spain, are rich in revealing detail and seem, by contrast, fully rounded. No reliable record survives of the way Titian conducted himself in the company of friends, let alone in private. The Ferrarese ambassador in 1522 claims that the artist is ...”