“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”