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“... motherhood is a superior ‘means of travelling through time’. According to the less playful Marilyn French, it is a dangerous form of transport: ‘It is not the sins of the fathers that descend unto the third generation, but the sorrows of the mothers.’ Some of the sorrows examined in her fat book are produced by grim circumstances: women are ...”

“... they didn’t seem made for each other. Christopher also fails in his liaison with his exciting French partner, Annick, and lapses into marriage with the sensible English girl Marion. And, in the last significant episode of the novel, a Metrolander once more, he doesn’t commit adultery:   ‘OK then?’ she suddenly said.   ‘OK what?’ I ...”

“... by Joan Smith, includes information regarding the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Australia. Marilyn French deals with Southern and Eastern countries, including the ‘Third World’ – a term which she thinks passé and dishonest. Both books are contemporary and well-informed, and both announce by their very existence that the Nineties are going ...”

“... equally well. So it was only a matter of time before Shakespeare became a feminist. To do Dr French justice, though, she does not exactly claim that: only that he was fully aware of all the issues involved and sorted out psychological and moral experience on that basis. Thus his female characters can be divided into inlaws and outlaws, two categories ...”

“... Islamic position to studies of ‘women and discourse’, replete with quotes from Julia Kristeva, Marilyn French and Laura Mulvey. The official Saudi obsession with control produces visible tensions. An example is the restriction on representation of the human form in the media. It has no Koranic authority, but, in Saudi Arabia and, in an even more ...”

“... Can you name the author who set you thinking? For Philip French, at a Bristol grammar school in the 1950s, the enlighteners were Edmund Wilson, F.R. Leavis and Lionel Trilling. For me, at a Wimbledon grammar school in the 1950s, Bertrand Russell filled the slot on his own, largely because his History of Western Philosophy was so long ...”

“... Authors are not the solitaries of the Romantic myth, but citizens.’ The spirit of Marilyn Butler’s excellent book on the Romantics is itself that of citizenship: of belonging to a civilised community, cultural and intellectual, which one helps to sustain and is sustained by, and which makes possible the truest duties, rights and privileges ...”

“... himself, Julia and Rome into fantasy, a more eloquent medium than their polite foreigners’ French. Every family with a series of drawings by the gifted professionals and amateurs of the 19th century should get them out. The Taaffes must have thought they had in their possession nothing more than a quaint relic of a long-dead great-aunt, until Brigid ...”

“... criticism has begun to focus on the problem of the 18th-century heroine. In a modish study of French and English novels, The Heroine’s Text, Nancy K. Miller speculates indignantly on the motives of male authors in humiliating their heroines – having them raped, punishing their sexual indulgence, or, equally patronisingly, rewarding them for their ...”

“... now call a ‘woman-hater’ – a view anticipated, in their own ways, by Leslie Fiedler and Marilyn French – it does at least have the merit of demonstrating just how far the misogynist line can be taken. If Jardine’s interpretations of plays by Shakespeare and other contemporary dramatists are correct, these works ought to be removed from all ...”

“... 1792 Burns the exciseman bought the guns from a ship caught smuggling and presented them to the French Convention. Lockhart attributes it to his father-in-law Walter Scott, but it now seems improbable. On the other hand, another much-cited episode of later the same year – that Burns joined in one or more demonstrations in the theatre at Dumfries in favour ...”

“... Richard Payne Knight was an important English intellectual of the era of the French Revolution. He flourished from the 1770s until his death, perhaps by suicide, in 1824. Most of that time he wielded great influence in the art world, as a leading collector, connoisseur and aesthetician, but as the theorist of potent subjects like myth and symbol he mattered almost as much to the poets ...”

“... were offered Judith Chernaik on Shelley’s feminism or Elma Dangerfield on Byron and Shelley or Marilyn Butler on the background to the politics of the Romantic poets. I had heard Judith a few times before, and reckoned Elma Dangerfield probably a bit right-wing for me, so I plumped for Marilyn Butler. After about two ...”

“... leading intellectuals, is just not very interesting about radicalism in Felix Holt the Radical. French novelists continue to mull over the French Revolution, English novelists do not. Recalling that Hegel once dubbed Napoleon ‘an idea on a horse’, Miss McCarthy suggests that the Continent’s advantage may be due to ...”

“... and obliges us to consider it as a collaborative popular invention. The idea of likening the French Revolution and particularly the Parisian mob to a parricidal monster may have occurred first to Edmund Burke. Already in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Burke saw the fomentors of revolutions as sinister magicians, the Parisian ...”