“... called ‘a wonder’. In Careless People, her new book on the writing of The Great Gatsby, Sarah Churchwell proceeds with a sturdy working theory: that it helps to understand and appreciate the book if you know what went into it. She’s not thinking about all the social and intellectual ferment of Fitzgerald’s early life that made him the man and ...”

“... so ensuring a small measure of – fragmentary – survival. There was to be no coming back after death as an entity; the posthumous condition that Barthes imagined for himself was a sociable version of the one he had sought to inflict most unsociably on the humanist notion of the integral Author. In S/Z, the integral or notional Balzac is separated out ...”

“... told us he had been alarmed by her condition when she arrived and wasn’t prepared to sign a death certificate. In such situations, the case is reported to a coroner and a postmortem arranged.Nine hours earlier, Merope and I had been in the ambulance that sped north through the city to GOSH. I held Martha’s head in my hands; her eyes were taped ...”

“... Chapman Brothers are there, and Sam Taylor-Wood (as was), as well as the jeweller Shaun Leane, and Sarah Burton, who would take over the label after his death and made Kate Middleton’s wedding dress. All McQueen’s earliest associates seemed to have stayed with him the whole way: this was a family business built around a ...”

“... of his wife). It was here that she wrote her memoirs, and remained until Charles-Emmanuel’s death three years later. She then settled in London, where she became a colourful figure at the court of Charles II, her other early soupirant, and then James II, remaining there for the rest of her life. In the meantime the duc de Mazarin continued his ...”

“... was solemnised by Southey and Coleridge in joint marriage to a pair of sisters, Edith and Sarah Fricker – a lucky shot for Southey, very much less so for Coleridge. The commune that never took shape is now embalmed in a few poems and the Platonic heat of a frank correspondence; but the friends worked steadily in Bristol in 1795, from an energy of ...”

“... skeletal face’ as Deedes ‘lifted his glass of water and sipped it’. Thirteen years after his death she is still chewing over this ‘unpleasant’ encounter which she now attributes to Deedes’s own ‘twilight relationship’ with a much younger writer at the paper. In fact, she had simply dealt the wrong card. She played ...”

“... confined to mockery of its deadpan original, but his Tragedy of Tragedies; or, the Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great was attuned to a broader climate of false feeling and the bombast that floated it. Gillray worked from a similar ambition. Unlike Fielding, he made a career of it.His nearest precursor was Hogarth, in the kinetic scenes of Marriage à ...”

“... view of Medieval Europe – it comes just after a sentence which declares that the Black Death drove all fit people to work on the land, a view so wrong one hardly knows where to start correcting it – the tone of confidence in modern progress and ‘the Western World’ is unmistakable. But are children really ‘a separate kind of ...”

“... black and white dress is belied by its gloss. Her late husband had been in the slave trade. Mrs Sarah Clayton (a courtesy ‘Mrs’, she was unmarried) held a leading position in the coal trade in Liverpool; she points to a plan of Clayton Square, a development she oversaw personally. In this portrait, although the setting is not outdoors, the ...”

“... a corpse-filled sea; the crew drinking themselves senseless to blunt the horrors of near-certain death; and, on the adjacent cliffs, country folk aghast at a catastrophe they can do nothing to alleviate. An all too frequent scene is that of sailors, deeming themselves safe at last, broaching spirits in such quantities that they die on the spot. Fourteen ...”

“... which influenced her frequent habit of using male narrators. During her McClure years she met Sarah Orne Jewett whose preference for ‘everyday people who grow out of the soul’ she much approved, though she mocked the old-fashioned life lived by Jewett and her female companion in Boston. In New York Cather formed a circle of admiring women friends ...”

“... to examine life as it is’. She received buckets of mail from priests who saw themselves in Death Comes for the Archbishop, from doughboys grateful for One of Ours, and what Cather called ‘love letters’ from young men struck by the September-May romance of A Lost Lady. And she lived, according to some posthumous critics, as a closeted ...”

“... for Tel Aviv and then Jerusalem, where Meir gave birth to a son, Menachem, in 1924 and a daughter, Sarah, two years later. But Meir felt ‘suffocation and resentment’: she had moved to Palestine ‘to become a new Jew, cultivating the land with her toil’, in the words of her earlier biographer Francine Klagsbrun in Lioness: Golda Meir and the Nation of ...”

“... her loving focus as curiosity he didn’t welcome. He became secretive. But after her husband’s death two years earlier Lucie Freud had tried to kill herself. She lost interest in the world and stopped worrying about her son. Her new lack of concern liberated him. His paintings of her are some of the most memorable he ever made. Each is distinct and ...”