“... 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 ...”

“... the visiting speakers included Sylvia Wynter, C.L.R. James, Walter Rodney and James and Grace Lee Boggs.Cruse had been recruited in response to increasing discontent among Black students at the university. The publication of The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual in 1967 had turned him into a campus celebrity. (‘Throughout the late 1960s and early ...”

“... were tan, smartly suited, well-gelled, and clearly unhumbled by the historical moment. The obscure child, Tiffany, was sweet and sad. Her parents married after she was born and split up a few years later, but ‘my father always asked about my family in Georgia to make sure that they are healthy and safe.’ Trump’s current wife, Melania, with her heavy ...”

“... was found in his trash containing three external hard drives with 37,000 videos and photographs of child pornography. It was Nassar’s arrest in December on porn charges that finally made even those who had continued to support him realise their confidence in his ‘procedures’ had been misplaced. But USA Gymnastics bizarrely still tried to assert ...”

“... superheroes under assumed names: it’s a room full of Clark Kents. The Marvel powerhouse Stan Lee, who created or co-created such dynamos as Spider-Man, The Fantastic Four, The Incredible Hulk, The X-Men and Doctor Strange, was born Stanley Martin Lieber. And the first issue of Superman was published, in 1938, by two young American Jews, Jerry Siegel and ...”

“... career was built on a false legend, he now tells the truth. The vicious bandit Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin) personifies savage violence, which the Western characteristically counters with the hero’s measured, civilised violence. Such is the legend of Ransom Stoddard as the man who shot Liberty Valance. But the senator reveals that, when he bravely faced ...”

“... Orson Welles and W.C. Fields. When, late in life, Bergen became the father of a flesh and blood child called Candice, he whimsically brought her up as Charlie McCarthy’s kid sister. In her impressively restrained autobiography, Knock Wood, Candice Bergen remembered Charlie’s room in the family house in Beverly Hills, with its neat bed, a wardrobe ...”

“... certain curious details retain their vividness (‘Enrique confessing that he would like to have a child. The experience of childbirth, those were his words’); much has been forgotten (‘I think he was writing from Madrid, but I’m not sure any more’); much was never known (why Martín had to travel to Cartagena and Málaga for work); and the tale is ...”

“... teams, especially the New England Patriots. I grew up outside Boston, and spent summers as a child with my grandmother in Rindge, New Hampshire, in the state’s rural south-western corner. I felt more or less, though not necessarily happily, at home in this crowd – as if it were a family gathering of my more aggressive cousins or a high school reunion ...”

“... seems patiently to have accepted as the necessary facilitators of his art. One of them, Cindy Lee, persuaded him in 1965 to run away to Mexico, which was a good place to find mind-enhancing drugs. The trip (in both the geographic and the pharmacological senses) was not a success, and he returned to his wife in a Mallorca which was increasingly a place of ...”

“... the pupils are half-hidden under the eyelids; as if the eyes had stopped between floors. Spike Lee has similar eyes, which I find attractive, maybe because they give a sense of inhabiting worlds other than this; they are, of course, irritating for exactly the same reason.A call from Barry Cryer, who claims to have heard a woman outside Liberty’s saying ...”

“... with absurd trivialities.In my answer, both in Berkeley and Mantua, I talked about how, as a child, I had felt oppressed by the news: by the way the mood in the room shifted when men came on TV, to speak of the great deeds of other men, and by the aura of gravitas that surrounded these deeds, which seemed to annihilate every other aspect of life, the ...”

“... But dark is good. We are conceived and carried in the darkness. When my son was born, a midwinter child, he cried pitifully at the ward’s lights, and settled to sleep only when he was laid in a big pram with a black hood under a black umbrella. Our vocabulary ebbs with the daylight, closes down with the cones of our retinas. I looked up ‘darkness’ on ...”

“... critical call) – rhyme scheme: ‘Mandy’, ‘handy’, ‘dandy’. Waller trills ‘Lalala-lee-lo’ quite sarcastically and scrambles the lyrics with an indescribable gurgling sound. ‘Mandy’ was featured in a new Eddie Cantor movie, Kid Millions, and the recording aimed to capitalise on this. Waller’s scornful attack is thus especially ...”