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“... stupid and offensive things which no amount of radical ingenuity can reclaim. He sympathised with Lee Oswald because he saw him as a solitary opponent of ‘American society’; he thought blacks in America had ‘a natural poetic sense’ which informed their politics; Stalin’s mass murders were for him mere figments of anti-Communists gossip; he admired ...”

“... to bring forth. With the other children she had her way. With Bernard, her third son and fourth child, she did not, or only at the price of repeated punishment, usually with the cane. ‘What have I done, what have I done?’ Bernard used to ask when he ran out into the Tasmanian bush to recover from his latest beating. But he knew. ‘Goodness, she was ...”

“... In terms of historical time, therefore, the happy ending of Gatty’s tale – the survival of the child, the recovery of Gatty after her apparent death and years of mental illness – seems to repair the tragedy of Sally, who dies along with her daughter, as if the divisions of North and South, Tory and Whig, Catholic and Protestant, which had been re-opened ...”

“... v. culture is where we have got to after debates in the West spanning millennia. Benjamin Lee Whorf gave Sapir’s ideas their most radical twist. He was employed all his life by an insurance company as a chemical engineer; his business acumen was directed at the causes of fires. In his free time he studied under Sapir. Reporting later from the ...”

“... children’s prospects by paying for their education do I therefore object to parents sending a child to ballet classes. The Mail predictably labels me a hypocrite because I use both the NHS and private medicine, an admission I’d made myself on the radio, but with the Mail, as always, pretending it’s information it’s been clever enough to find ...”

“... young client had none of the star power of already signed performers like Benny Goodman and Peggy Lee; his billing read ‘Extra Added Attraction’, and for Sinatra this particular gig was a pretty big deal. As Donald Clarke puts it in All or Nothing at All: A Life of Frank Sinatra (1997), the Paramount Theatre was ‘one of the shrines of the Swing ...”

“... enchantment that came completely naturally,’ Julia Costenla, an Argentine journalist told Jon Lee Anderson when he was researching his biography of Guevara. ‘If he entered a room, everything began revolving around him.’That night he found a seat in a corner of the embassy gardens and everyone gathered round. I haven’t much memory of what was ...”

“... the psychiatric wing Mam was to be admitted to not part of the main complex but a villa, Ridge Lee, set in its own grounds, and as we left Mam with a nurse in the entrance hall it seemed almost cheerful. Dad was not uncheerful either, relieved that now at any rate something was going to be done and that she was ‘in professional hands’. Even Mam seemed ...”

“... to be taken seriously as an actress. Monroe’s mother blamed her daughter for being born, and the child grew up with a dark memory of people screaming in the hall, of departures and uncertainties, and of men taking advantage of her loneliness and dependence. Even Marilyn seemed to realise that dressing up – going on show – was a way of providing an answer ...”

“... much to reconstruct her life as to account for what life did to her. Charlotte Mew was the third child (out of eight) of Fred Mew, a farmer’s son from the Isle of Wight, who had come to London to be trained as an architect by H.E. Kendall. In 1863 he married Kendall’s daughter, a tiny, silly woman who was ‘above’ him, and always made him feel so: he ...”

“... man once asked him what it was like finishing a novel. ‘It’s like taking your first-born child out onto the lawn and shooting it through the head,’ he said. Truman Capote may have taken to writing non-fiction because he was more comfortable with facts than he was with the truth. A good novelist, one who wrote in the Capote manner, could not avoid ...”

“... One of Rach’s many grievances, posted on her blog, is that he never wanted a child, to which his forlorn response is: ‘Didn’t I try not just to want one but to have one?’ The formula might be more eloquent the other way round, hinting at something he keeps well hidden, namely a desire to mesh with other people’s priorities rather ...”

“... people who ever walked the earth, she plays a heroic role at the beginning by introducing her only child to the music she loved. After work on Fridays, she often bought a new 78, enjoying the sound of big band and some American singers. One week she brought home a record by Elvis Presley. Her son already knew the name: the previous weekend in the local ...”

“... once a beauty of magnificence unparalleled, now a beauty with a leprous skin. She is heavy with child – no one knows if legitimate – and languishes in a dungeon whose walls are never seen. Now the first contractions of her fearsome labour begin – it will go on: no doctor exists to tell the hour … she will probably give birth, and to what? – the ...”

“... prejudiced Historian (1791). Lewis’s reading of the most compelling of these, Sophia Lee’s three-volume epistolary novel The Recess (1783-85), is the emotional core of her book. Lewis is alive to the grand and labyrinthine absurdity of Lee’s plotting, which details the amorous misfortunes of Mary’s ...”