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“... than its antecedents, Reformation Mennonism was a sternly dissentient creed, loathed by Protestant power-brokers, but its puritan radicalism soon eroded into defensive conservatism. Modern Mennonism, like most Protestant confessions, is sharply divided between hardcore traditionalists and liberal modernisers – although to describe any brand of Mennonism as ...”

“... end it makes me think that the body was governing the mind. The rehearsal of all this is painful. Anne Stevenson, against the odds, has written a decent and intelligent book. It is certainly the best book on Sylvia Plath so far – and it isn’t graceless to point out that most of the earlier books have been conspicuously unsatisfactory. But Bitter Fame ...”

“... Anne Lister was undoubtedly one of the most unorthodox women of the early 19th century. She was an active and entirely unashamed lesbian, a scholar, a dauntless traveller and a resourceful businesswoman. As an example of what female tenacity could achieve in the pre-Victorian period, she might be seen as a fortifying ideal ...”

“... field. The ‘new’ political and (to a lesser degree) diplomatic history, seen as the study of power, conflict resolution and sources of authority (le pouvoir and les pouvoirs); the history of state formation and the ‘polity’; recent work on violence, the emotions, faction and rebellion; recent currents in intellectual and gender history – these are ...”

“... line whose direct descendants have reigned since the death of the last Stuart monarch, Queen Anne, in 1714; and England had been united with Scotland as the Kingdom of Great Britain in the Union of 1707. Notwithstanding various important extensions after 1832, which widened the electoral franchise, and several additional embellishments, the foundations ...”

“... the Year 1710 was a none too subtle attempt at vindicating her brief period as favourite to Queen Anne, justifying her personal and political roles, refuting slanders against her and her warrior husband, and defaming her enemies, both dead and alive. Through their numerous recensions, Sarah’s memoirs became more rather than less embittered. The slights she ...”

“... 1984 – and will be reissued this summer.In 1927 Charlotte Mew was 58 and living with her sister Anne, a decorative painter, at the Hogarth Studios near Tottenham Court Road. Alida was Harold Monro’s wife, and a friend to both Mew sisters. Sydney Cockerell was the director of the Fitzwilliam Museum. Evelyn Millard had become a friend of ...”

“... cultivated, public-spirited persons for the rest of time. But Iris Murdoch’s writing has the power to engage the reader in its conflicts, even without the pleasures of recognition or sympathy; and though they are slow in developing, the conflicts are not absent. There are lengthy annexes and excursions that gradually become folded into the main ...”

“... Captain Wentworth acknowledges this when, in the happy afterglow of declaring himself to Anne and being accepted, he explains his past behaviour to her. He tells her that, in the eight years since she was persuaded to reject his first proposal of marriage, ‘he had been constant unconsciously, nay unintentionally; that he had meant to forget ...”

“... or nothing at all? ‘Love I laugh to scorn,’ says one of Emily’s poems, and the ‘strange power’ longed for in another is the power of, and for, annihilation. Neither God nor love is in question, but food, or the absence of it, is: a substance both obsessive and despised. Heathcliff is the tyrant of the ...”

“... Puritan female, and from voyageur fiction to a novel whose central metaphor is that of the voyeur. Anne Foster, an underemployed art historian and mother of two, decides on a nine-month separation from her husband in order for both to pursue their careers. Anne stays on with the children in Selby, Massachusetts, a town which ...”

“... man or a woman, you will hear these dialogues differently. Nevertheless, the balance of narrative power in Present Times is by no means evenly distributed. Attercliffe is the only character present in every scene of the book and the only character privileged to observe and reflect upon his surroundings. Apparently, this gives him a major advantage in the ...”

“... grew up the daughters of a conscientious manufacturer who had inherited the estate, wealth and power of a successful Victorian enterprise in a typical well-to-do Ontario town called Port Ticonderoga. The Chase family wealth was based on buttons. (There is a hidden gibe here at Henry James, who in The Ambassadors would not let Strether tell us what was the ...”

“... goodies spend all their time in the ‘forefront of community struggles’: the baddies have their power base among the ‘right-wing Catholic dockers’ and are intent on ‘selling the local community down the river’. They are a ‘handful of right-wingers’ who ‘ruthlessly manipulate the rules’, ‘turn their backs on socialist principles’ and ...”

“... of the screen. The picture snapped with a mobile may be charged with immediacy, but it lacks the power to reflect on the world it so eagerly, even promiscuously records. Or is it that the world ‘out there’ has somehow become invisible, little more than a background to the self? Salt and Silver catalyses such reflections. Oddly enough, after each of my ...”