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“... creativity and explains the secrets of his appeal in a way unmatched by any other critic’. Alan Bliss’s purpose is more modest. Twenty years ago he had the idea of publishing a paper on the Anglo-Saxon story of Finn and Hengest. Discovering that nearly all his conclusions had been anticipated in lectures by Tolkien (the diffident words are ...”

“... to as ‘them man-women’. ‘Oh,’ one is tempted to exclaim with the Radlett children, ‘the bliss of being you!’ Or at any rate the bliss of being him now, remembering (and being able to remember) it all. Of course, it wasn’t much fun at the time. There was no cachet in youth at that time. One was merely a failed ...”

“... I had homesickness.’ Had she perhaps kept a diary? ‘Of course.’ And here it is. Life with Alan has not been Eva Haraszti’s only life. She was 55 when, in 1978, she left Budapest to come to London as A.J.P. Taylor’s third wife: she was a widow, a scholar, and the mother of two grown-up sons. Her diary reports on the time she has spent as an amateur ...”

“... a neutral holding zone, where the punishment consists in deprivation: sinners cannot share in the bliss of uniting with God in paradise. Such theological debates have a long history. In the third century, Origen, who castrated himself in the hope of frustrating temptation, kindly thought that, at the end of time, all God’s creatures would be saved. So ...”

“... My great new friend is Noël Coward’, Nancy Mitford confided to a correspondent in 1949. ‘Bliss. He shakes like a jelly at one’s jokes, I adore that.’ It was laughs Nancy Mitford wanted, much more than grandeur. She longs to make people laugh, and sometimes, almost in the manner of a nervous stand-up comedienne, interrupts her letters to make sure that the audience is suitably convulsed ...”

“... off the train in Munich on the morning of the Night of the Long Knives and Diana saying: ‘What bliss. The first time I’ve been on a train without a nanny or a husband!’ Ariel’s language is a joy. About meeting Hitler she remarks: I was pregnant at the time so I wasn’t feeling very … brisk. Hitler said, “I only have four words in a foreign ...”

“... the very notion of the public quite ludicrous. (How she would struggle today!) Her idea of perfect bliss, she once said, was lots of peasants happy in their cottages as she whiled away her time even more happily in the big house. That is quite funny, of course, and it reminds you that the whole, wonderful Mitford achievement depends not only on a perfect ear ...”

“... voice.’ (Hastings presents this as directly autobiographical.) ‘I have never experienced the bliss of requited love,’ he wrote in 1938 in The Summing Up, an autobiographical essay, ‘I am incapable of complete surrender … I have most loved people who cared little or nothing for me, and when people have loved me I have been embarrassed.’ With time ...”

“... This was a golden age, too, for the admen, who readily saw that the way to symbolise pneumatic bliss was to identify the product with an ample, bare-bosomed female – in classical mode to allay criticism. Such pictures did more for the cause, at a guess, than the full-length portrait of the courtesan Blanche d’Antigny in her species of bloomer ...”

“... All about Eve, to any Western saloon, booze is the magnifier for all that 30-foot-tall emoting. As Alan Rudolph’s lugubrious 1995 biopic of Dorothy Parker, Mrs Parker and the Vicious Circle, illustrates, it was Prohibition that made boozing an essential act of transgression among the Hollywood crowd of the Twenties and Thirties, matching the literary hard ...”

“... have followed their example, negotiating a careful periphrasis around the discourse of wedded bliss, opting instead for the unchallenging space of what we might call the parigamic: the language of ‘lovers’, ‘partners’, ‘girlfriends’ and ‘boyfriends’, rather than ‘spouse’, ‘husband’ and ‘wife’. If gay weddings are suddenly more ...”

“... enjoying an adventurous voyage and uttering Enlightenment cries in Romantic language. ‘Oh, bliss, to be young in the light of morning over the sea! To awaken refreshed, young and strong, every sense on the alert! Malte Moritz! My name, hovering like a kite in liberty’s breezes. Malte Moritz von Putbus. To my friends, though, I am often ...”

“... who have difficulty recognising their own sexual experience in this mythology of modern carnal bliss have been tempted to rewrite the story as one of tightening and intensifying patriarchal domination. This is the temptation to which Mary Jane Sherfey succumbs in The Nature and Evolution of Female Sexuality, where ‘the rise of modern civilisation’ is ...”

“... a four-line poem dedicated to ‘J.M.’, suggests it was companionship rather than sexual bliss that he sought in his efforts to recover his ‘lost rib’: Ghosts do not kiss, or, if they kiss, they feel    Ice touching ice, and turn away, and shiver; But there as here, perhaps, we still can steal    Quietly off, and talk and talk for ...”

“... value the lives of Oscar Wilde and Roger Casement, and differing from them in its calm, domestic bliss and lack of a tragic ending. Soon after meeting Merrill, Carpenter began a correspondence with Symonds, The question for both of them was how to explain their own homosexuality to the English public: how much to use ancient Greek homosexuality as the basis ...”