“... psychology; I’m not sure there’s anything comparable in American literary history.† I was a young-gun devotee of Mailer, who made possible my start in writing, but I never wanted him to file adoption papers. A patriarchal nimbus settled on Bellow in his later years that remains unique, inspiring, a little weird, a bit Holy Ghost. Attending Bellow’s ...”

“... in Greenwich Village, and through one of the actresses there met and began taking classes with Allan Miller, a disciple of Lee Strasberg. She auditioned for Strasberg’s Actors Studio aged sixteen, and though she didn’t get in they encouraged her to try again later; piqued, she never did. When she left school in January 1960, she had her first role ...”

“... take a breath and look at his life, at how it was and how it was probably going to stay; but also young enough, particularly when surrounded by the bustling confident egoism of the Wordsworth household, to do what Yeats called taking ‘a great kick at human misery’, making it fertile, understanding it and mastering it. As early as 1797, everything in ...”

“... said. “I’ll call the whole thing Le Séminaire and divide it into numbered volumes.” The young man had set sail on a terrible voyage.’ Lacan bequeathed Miller a life’s work. Miller was not simply ‘editing’ but ‘establishing’ the text of the seminar. He added language where there were gaps, he removed contradictions and ...”

“... been so vulnerable: ‘Your word against his,’ as one UK college adviser said recently to a young undergraduate who’d been raped by a student, to discourage her from going to the police (the student turned out to be a serial rapist). To say the absence of witnesses can be abused is an understatement. In December, four women in the US revived sexual ...”

“... proud guts and tapering legs which bent backwards from the knee down, sparse-haired with old-young faces, as if they had done their ageing a lot quicker than one year at a time. I don’t know whether these frighteners would have frightened anybody much on the American circuit, but I guess they were big enough and their intention was plain. (Did you read ...”

“... share price based on the number of letters they’d posted over their lifetime. According to Hugo Young, Thatcher had to be talked into Right to Buy by a desperate Edward Heath, then her leader, who’d been persuaded by his friend Pierre Trudeau after his electoral defeat in February 1974 that he needed a fistful of populist policies. No wonder Thatcher ...”

“... before your fascinated gaze. The mechanism in its complacent little box is as remorseless as Edgar Allan Poe’s tell-tale heart and as silent as Conan Doyle’s dog that didn’t bark. It’s the silence that drives you mad. A second site visit was arranged. A second site visit was cancelled. Indulging my native paranoia, I believed that they must have ...”

“... Sharples team. The first is a photocopy of the original handwritten note of an interview with a young Irishman named John McGuinness, one of several friends and acquaintances of Armstrong, Hill, Conlon and Richardson taken into custody in December 1974. Although he was later cleared of any involvement, at the time of his detention the police seemed to think ...”

“... first meetings Lowell returned to the image of water. ‘But the fact is we were swimming in our young age, with the water coming down on us, and we were gulping.’ In Bishop’s world there was always water. The house in Great Village in Nova Scotia where she spent some of her childhood still stands in a strange coastal flatness, as though it could be ...”

“... computers or use their phones. ‘I tried to intervene,’ one senior staff member, a Dane called Allan Pedersen, remarked later, ‘and said we would have to call our lawyers.’ Ramona wasn’t keen to tell her family what was happening. The reporters were sniffing at a strange story – a story too complicated for her to explain – so she just told ...”