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“... For I will consider my lover, who shall remain nameless. For at the age of 49 he can make the noise of five different kinds of lorry changing gear on a hill. For he sometimes does this on the stairs at his place of work. For he is embarrassed when people overhear him. For he can also imitate at least three different kinds of train. For these include the London tube train, the steam engine and the Southern Rail electric ...”

“... Perhaps, in order to find Molesworth utterly hilarious, it is necessary to have read it as a child. Wendy Cope claims to ‘hav been reading this stuff and roaring with larffter since i was 11 yrs old’ (which, if nothing else, endorses Philip Hensher’s assertion in the introduction to this edition that those who attempt to imitate Molesworth’s style always ‘come a cropper ...”

“... a verbose typescript by his friend T.S. Eliot, with results that are famous. More recently, Wendy Cope gave The Waste Land fresh scrutiny and decided that the job could be done pretty well in the space of five limericks. The first of these goes: In April one seldom feels cheerful; Dry stones, sun and dust make me fearful; Clairvoyantes distress ...”

“... reclaiming the right to speak rather than be spoken for. Women’s love poems differ from men’s, Wendy Mulford argues, by not exploiting the love object or muse: instead of veneration they express cussedness and bad temper, and cut their men down to human size. Women’s erotica differs from men’s, Jeanette Winterson argues, by seeking ‘to return women ...”

“... be complacent. ‘I am of very fond bananas. / Am I a poet?’ This is the interrogative ending of Wendy Cope’s poem on de Chirico’s painting The Uncertainty of the Poet, or at least on a Guardian report, which she quotes as an epigraph to the poem, of the million-pound purchase by the Tate Gallery of that picture: a picture which, as the Guardian’s ...”

“... own novel in verse, The Illusionists. One of the book’s best satires is a scabrous fantasy on Wendy Cope and Fiona Pitt-Kethley, who were each launched last year to huge popular acclaim. Pitt-Kethley has been the quicker to consolidate her success, and her new collection, Private Parts, shouldn’t disappoint the large following that Sky Ray Lolly ...”

“... in individual style: the actual machinery is efficient, but seems directed to no particular end. Wendy Cope makes fun of this and other fashionable modes in a series of ‘Strugnell’ poems – works of a fictional bard who is notionally the most chameleonic of all in this book, turning out his versions of Crow, haikus and ‘Mr Bleaney’ as well. She ...”

“... and Yeats, but nothing too early and strange in Auden and nothing of Yeats and his gyres. It likes Wendy Cope and Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell and Thomas Hardy and the lullabies of Housman. It prefers poets whose speakers say how they feel, and feel what they say, while never running out of rhythm and never speaking in ...”

“... as that of the unruly boy. He was slow to accept that girls could be children: they were, like Wendy, really mothers in waiting. An anxious idealisation of his own forceful mother shaped his personality from the first. The story of his life seems almost too transparent in the clues it offers to his distinctive mind. Born in 1860 to a handloom ...”

“... stifled more utopian aspirations for social justice and self-determination. The political theorist Wendy Brown has argued that when devolution becomes a function of ‘governance’ rather than democracy, it ‘frequently means that large-scale problems, such as recessions, finance-capital crises, unemployment, or environmental problems, as well as fiscal ...”

“... history starts to crowd it out. In September​ last year, in Lutterworth in Leicestershire, I met Wendy Warren. She was born in Kent in 1935 and moved to Leicester just after the Second World War when her father, an engineer, found work there. She did well at school and was set to go to college, but her father lost his job and she chose to help her mother by ...”

“... helplessly boyish’. Even a truly vile and racist humiliator of women is ‘more sad than bad’. Wendy, meet Peter. One reason we can accept Kate’s disillusion with her work is the poignancy of her daughter’s need for her. (‘This is my mummy. Isn’t she lovely and tall?’ Emily says proudly when Kate comes with her to school.) Another is that her job ...”

“... Canada is the supreme example of how first past the post can explode into madness when it has to cope with more than two contending parties. In Quebec, the Bloc Québécois got nearly 24 per cent of the votes but only 5.3 per cent of the seats. In Saskatchewan, the NDP won almost a third of the vote – and no seats at all. That’s the insult to democracy ...”

“... Isabel), fled Colombia, went into hiding and fought lawsuits, blackmail and media attacks. To cope with the stress, she studied for a diploma in ‘leadership and ontological coaching’ and came to rely on the services of an astrologer to Latin America’s elite, Mauricio Puerta, who has written the introduction to her book. (He attributes Escobar’s ...”