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“... is a collection of the writings of Rebecca West from 1911 to 1917, selected and introduced by Jane Marcus, with just the right amount of explanation and comment. In one respect it is an unfortunate title, suggesting an item from the cast-list of almost any black-and-white film about almost any celebrity, but in the respect that it makes a point of ...”

“... 19th-century social history, but it is carefully shaped to fit in with the neighbouring pieces. Jane Rogers’s fourth novel is full of information about the harshness of the Industrial Revolution, the plight of the weavers and spinners, and the fight against the Combination Acts. Through the device of a character who was reared in Owenite circles, we get ...”

“... a generous succession of ‘small touches’ rather than large grabs. Thus, in Flesh (1962), when Marcus – unappealing, a hopeless case, a ‘voodoo scarecrow’ – is taken up by the brisk and attractive Nancy, he feels ‘like a derelict property suddenly bought up by a speculator. He was bound to wonder what was to be made of him.’ There ...”

“... female husbands chose to live as men, I refer to them using male pronouns.Mesch’s first subject, Jane Dieulafoy (b. 1851), was a French patriot, a Catholic, an archaeologist and a sharpshooter in the Franco-Prussian War. They were married to the engineer and archaeologist Marcel-Auguste Dieulafoy and together the couple undertook a number of expeditions to ...”

“... Emerson wanted readers to stumble over the Latinism that punctuates this numbed passage. James Marcus tells us that it is a botanical term for the part of a plant that is easily shed as it develops. His zingy, empathetic portrait of Emerson grounds our understanding of his writing – perhaps even his wisdom – in his experience of loss. It often comes ...”

“... thing about the Vietnam combat zone that it was no place for American women – unless like Jane Fonda they were in the business of giving aid and comfort to the enemy. War is an exclusive male club. Women have their room; men have their battlefield. All this makes for an initial difficulty in coming to terms with Buffalo Afternoon. It is – in its ...”

“... whom heroism was an obsession. He used his own head as a model for Christ, Solomon, Alexander and Marcus Curtius and believed that heroic history painting was the highest form of art. Today his only generally remembered work is a portrait of Wordsworth. In his lifetime Haydon was well-known and not without admirers but he was dogged increasingly by ridicule ...”

“... dressed well, seeming to offer a degree of stability along with freedom. In her story ‘Goodbye Marcus, goodbye Rose’ a girl called Phoebe recites:  If no one ever marries me And I don’t see why they should. For nurse says I’m not pretty And I’m seldom very good ... She was pretty, if the photo on the cover is anything to go by, but it gave her ...”

“... transfer of power, and soon the death of Edward and the failed coup d’état in the name of Lady Jane Grey, followed by the successful coup and triumph of Elizabeth’s Catholic sister. The Protestant princess, seen as her father’s true daughter and ‘mere English’, was now at the centre of plots, and dabbling in treason herself, just like her Scottish ...”

“... with illustrations by Sandow Birk, he took on the project himself with a friend, surf journalist Marcus Sanders. Their translation is into the vernacular of guy inarticulateness, with a little slang, which is to say its frequent awfulness must be intentional. Throughout most of the English-speaking world, citizens speak English like, well, native ...”

“... it’s hardly a ‘story’ – was ‘Mail’, in which a cartographer and minor poet named Marcus Firetuck quotes from, and meditates upon, a variety of eccentrics who maintain a frail acquaintanceship with him solely through letter-writing, fellow ‘citizens of the country of correspondence’. Seasoned admirers of Kingsley Amis will enjoy ...”

“... in this sad knot,’ we can feel that Ferdinand, too, really does have a lot on his mind. As does Marcus, in Titus Andronicus, when he thinks about the brutal injury done to Titus and Lavinia, his arms folded in a ‘sorrow-wreathen knot’. But in the end it is the precariousness of gesture which interests Shakespeare. Titus has to point out to ...”

“... piece of game, he found the body of his own child. There’s a trace of this type of legend in Jane Eyre’s first encounter with Mr Rochester, but here the predator’s quarry is a young woman and the episode has erotic overtones: the sound of his horse’s hooves reminds her of the Gytrash, a ‘north-of-England spirit’ from ‘one of Bessie’s ...”

“... figures as the erotic novelist Achilles Tatius, the philosopher Sextus the Empiricist, the emperor Marcus Aurelius, the Christian apologist Clement of Alexandria and Lucian? All of them were immensely erudite and rhetorically trained, and all worked within a tradition of classicising Hellenism; but in terms of social standing and literary output they could not ...”

“... Subsequent novels experimented with quotations, both embedded and epigraphic, from Pope, Keats, Marcus Aurelius and Marvell; and Deadheads (1983) broke new ground. Deadheading, of roses aesthetically and of people conveniently, is the donné of the plot, and the poets are raided for their words on roses to preface each section; but the chapter titles and ...”