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“... 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 ...”

“... And with the cinema too music is often the most powerful stimulant: I watched The Diary of Anne Frank for a time without tears until the arrival of some soupy music left me with two sodden handkerchiefs. So I am manifestly one of a host in whom tears are a cheap commodity. It always surprises me, therefore, when intelligent people talk with ...”

“... and last part, where she is exploited sexually by a bestial ship’s captain. The woman pirate Anne Bonny, an arch-aggressor in this aggressively male world, is an appropriate instrument to resolve the plot’s complexities. Even so, salvation seems a long time coming, though, to do Ms Jong justice, no longer than in some of Masefield’s 18th-century ...”

“... a woman who knew women didn’t need men. By the time of John Badham’s 1979 Dracula, starring Frank Langella as ‘a Dracula of fusion’, the women have become ‘victims no more’, but passionate creatures liberated by his bite – seekers ‘who embrace vampirism as the sole available escape from patriarchy’. The Dracula tradition is now revealed to ...”

“... psychology and the backchat of a paperhanger’. Sticking to his guns, he became (in the words of Frank O’Connor) ‘the greatest of all English storytellers’.Times change. Mention Coppard today and you’ll be met with blank looks. Until recently I knew him only by name, one I associated with a brand of gently nostalgic, middlebrow English writers who ...”

“... about the ideological price of that harmony. Do Emma and Mr Knightley, Elizabeth and Darcy, Anne and Captain Wentworth, Fanny and Edmund, represent ideal or merely idealised marriages? Do Austen’s novels foreclose their own vitality by choosing the safety of proper settlements? Are romance and marriage at odds ...”

“... St in 1950, the year before Schuyler’s breakdown, Schuyler met John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch and Frank O’Hara, who had been friends at Harvard. The ‘Harvard wits’, he called them. Schuyler had attended Bethany College, a small college in West Virginia affiliated with the Disciples of Christ, where he had devoted himself to bridge and then flunked ...”

“... she spoke always of liberty. The woman whom the press called Théroigne de Méricourt was born Anne-Josèphe Terwagne, in the village of Marcourt, not far from Liège. She was therefore not a Frenchwoman, but a subject of the Emperor of Austria. Her family were of peasant stock, but comfortably-off. The train of disasters in her life began when she was ...”

“... Windsor in 1917. Her method, already perfected in her unauthorised and unflattering biographies of Frank Sinatra and Nancy Reagan, is to write bestsellers that take what she describes as ‘an unblinking look’ at their subjects – which might, of course, mean that her eyes are permanently open or permanently closed. To this end, she has spent four years ...”

“... particular worry, because it meant that Bishop was off school much of the time. Later she told Anne Stevenson that ‘although I think I have a prize “unhappy childhood”, almost good enough for the textbooks, please don’t think I dote on it.’ Bishop will tell you that ‘I lost my mother’s watch,’ not that she lost her mother. Still, the pun on ...”

“... an exclusive game, often associated with royalty. Two French kings died of tennis injuries. Anne Boleyn was watching a game of tennis when she was arrested before her execution (Henry VIII was also a keen player – news of Anne’s death, legend has it, was brought to him mid-set). ‘At the peak of its popularity in ...”

“... The person chiefly responsible for the new note of jollity was Charles Hamilton, better known as Frank Richards, who made a Never Never Land of the English public school, but did it with such dash, amiability and authority that every subsequent generation, right up to the present, has contained its quota of Greyfriars enthusiasts. Greyfriars came into being ...”

“... and inspiration. Significantly, the poets got there first; and later it was a younger poet, Anne Stevenson, who wrote the first book about Bishop. One wonders if this helped or hindered the advancement of her reputation where such things are decided. To have been taken up by Jarrell, crying with such operatic hauteur in the wilderness and making no ...”

“... from a phrase in a line from Letters from Iceland, in MacNeice’s poem ‘Letter to Graham and Anne Shepard’ (‘The songs of jazz have told us of a moon country’). Moon Country contains poems, bits and pieces of reportage, a three-act verse-play by Maxwell, ‘Harald and the Lonely Hearts’, a long, untitled prose piece about his childhood by ...”

“... town. But it prompts, as from a garrulous taxi-driver, a rapid stream of lurid facts. The Duchesse Anne d’Uzès squandered millions on studs and hounds and her lover General Boulanger and his attempted coup which triggered his suicide (‘on the grave of yet another of his mistresses’), while her dissolute son wasted most of what was left on a courtesan ...”