“... 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 ...”

“... his apparent amorality – less glaciated or obviously affected than Warhol’s – resembled a child’s sado-curiosity. Of the notable events (or images) in his childhood, two stand out: the first is of the young Lynch registering with horror the black, ant-infested sap oozing out of a cherry tree, a sign of the ‘wild pain and decay that accompanies ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... for more money, Fleischmann turned him down.Over two years​ in Paris, Patsy had a stillborn child and then a son called Luke. Matthiessen quit the CIA just as the inaugural issue of the Paris Review went to press in 1953. Without his stipend and weary of swelling anti-American sentiment in Paris, he decided to take his family back to the US. Matthiessen ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”