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“... than Britain or the USA. And that conclusively pulls the rug out from under Casey Miller’s and Kate Swift’s Handbook of Non-Sexist Writing. Centuries of being unable to differentiate ‘he’ from ‘she’ have not made Hungarians non-sexist. There is not the smallest reason to expect that Britons and residents of the USA will turn non-sexist ...”

“... should be a minor typographical variant of the shorthand for ‘manuscript’. Casey Miller and Kate Swift, in Words and Women (1976), say Ms has been around since the 1940s, but remained largely unused and didn’t get into a dictionary until 1972. One factor in its resurgence was ‘the growth of direct mail selling’, for which the abbreviation was ...”

“... Hobbes through The Age of Dryden, then veer left. This brings you face to face with Pope and Swift. You will not have noticed anything in translation. If you do encounter any French political writing, you’ll know you’re in the wrong corridor. You’ll have to make a half-turn and backtrack through Sir Walter Scott. This is tricky. Be careful not to ...”

“... married his 13-year-old cousin. Strane teaches her the etymology of her name, invented by Jonathan Swift for a pupil 22 years younger than him. ‘Swift once knew a woman named Esther Vanhomrigh, nickname Essa,’ Strane tells her. ‘He broke her name apart and put it back together as something new … Van-Essa became ...”

“... facewash. She was only the second woman to join the company, so on her first day the email address kate@facebook.com was still available. As Facebook’s ur-Kate, she was ‘queen of a world in which every other Kate would be derived from my archetype’. While she wrote answers to ...”

“... his own contribution to state affairs, happy to trash-talk the Duke behind his back, though swift to fall into line when his deceptions are confronted. He is punished by being forced to marry Kate Keepdown, the prostitute he jilted when she gave birth to his child. Lucio refers to this marriage as like ‘pressing to ...”

“... boss he says: ‘The book exudes moral insanity in the way most modern fiction does.’ Reviewing Kate Millett, he observes: ‘erection-anxiety is the main source of evil in the world.’ Truth and Lies in Literature, a collection of reviews and essays, is full of such stuff, and, indeed, his last collection, The Rules of Chaos, was dedicated to ‘those ...”

“... kind of ability. That was not all: she could dazzle the Anglo-Irish undergraduate J.G. Swift MacNeill (the most likely such academic intermediary) with her beauty, wit, humane attitude to the peasants, splendid horsemanship and sundry other lovable Irish qualities. This was in 1872, just when Rose was planning a rapprochement with Ruskin that was ...”

“... PWR, IWICSLMSK and BHQ (respectively, Pee-Wee Russell, ‘I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate’ and ‘Bastard Headquarters’, meaning God’s Heaven, or, more generally, the place where things go wrong or get fucked up, said in one letter to be located in France). It cost the Huntington $90,000 to obtain the Amis archive and not everyone approved ...”

“... her bosun Germaine Greer beside her, and her crew of investigators fast behind (they include Kate Millett, purser; Mary Daly, doctor; Erica Jong, navigator). Soon, the whole group is making earnest inquiry of the only untouched indigenous individuals they will ever have the good fortune to question, for Dorinda and Hippolito have no knowledge of ...”

“... sound-bites from a phantom Smith Square manifesto. Two coppers can’t sit down for a swift half without debating the morality of capital punishment. (‘I happen to believe that the death penalty does deter, so what I’m saying is that I’m willing for innocent people to take a greater chance of being murdered so that I can salve my conscience ...”

“... contact with him except through his work and it has always seemed phoney to me.’ On the novelist Kate O’Brien: ‘I find literary people bore me to almost the point of violence.’ On Austin Clarke, the reigning high priest of Irish poetry: ‘a sentimentalist gone sour’.Among McGahern’s circle was the painter Patrick ...”

“... a ban on any music deemed too fast or too slow to comply with the ‘Chechen mentality’. Taylor Swift is a no-no – too fast. The Russian national anthem – too slow. There would seem to be a political subtext here, along the lines of ‘One’s just as bad as the other,’ but let it pass.Where would Arthur Russell fit on the Chechnya index? Breathless ...”

“... humourless militants, I was pleased to make the acquaintance of the constitutionalist organiser Kate Frye, who wasn’t above using her good looks to enlist male help: she shouldn’t flirt so much, she wrote in her diary, but it did get things moving and ‘in some moods, I could flirt with a broomstick.’ Robinson pays refreshing attention to the high ...”

“... unshakeable confidence in her closest servants, and especially in her ‘mistress’, Kate Ashley, who had herself behaved dangerously. Such loyalties, some of the few sentimental streaks in her character, were perhaps related to the insecurity of her parental relationships: a mother decapitated, a father she almost never saw. More lessons from ...”