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“... In Donna Tartt’s novel The Secret History, a group of clever, fastidious preppies in a small liberal arts college on the East Coast reinvent the cult of Dionysus. They brew a concoction of ivy leaves, and embark on the ritual frenzy that culminates in the ‘omophagy’, a feast of raw flesh to be eaten by initiates. Their experiment is informed by Jane Harrison’s researches into the figure of Bacchus and the ‘thiasos’, his band of ecstatic worshippers ...”

“... Doris Langley Moore’s biography did not pussyfoot. But there were some things she could not say. Julia Briggs says them. When Edith Nesbit married Hubert Bland in 1880 she was 21, and seven months pregnant. She had spent her childhood shuttling across Europe with her tubercular sister and widowed mother: a series of autobiographical sketches – more ...”

“... from inside the world that is outside me.Great claims have been made for this little read poem. Julia Briggs, who produced a set of exhaustive and illuminating glosses reproduced in Faber’s centenary edition, described it as a ‘lost modernist masterpiece’. It has been called a precursor to and possible model for The Waste Land (in Paris the dead ...”

“... of Henry IV Part I with his original name of Oldcastle. In the Middleton collection, the late Julia Briggs edits the dubiously titled Second Maiden’s Tragedy as The Lady’s Tragedy, Paul Mulholland turns the lively Honest Whore into the didactic-sounding The Patient Man and the Honest Whore, while Valerie Wayne in her otherwise excellent text of A ...”

“... that Tennyson may have had an extramarital affair with the legendarily unaphrodisiac photographer, Julia Cameron. His evidence for this, incredibly, is ‘vulgar speculation’ that he has chanced to pick up still circulating in pubs on the Isle of Wight. ‘Such gossip,’ he tells us, ‘because of its vulgarity, can be too easily swept aside.’ And, he ...”