“... I was raised by a river. ‘Thick’ is a good word for the way water seemed to me when I was young and still seems now: sustaining, brown, benign – or white, decisive, invigorating, rushing over a weir, churning from the back of a boat. Having been adopted, I was spared the binding notion of blood, with all its passion and fatalism. I simply took the ...”

“... are rarely diapers for the babies and toddlers who have been taken from their parents. Some are as young as five months. In one camp, five hundred children are confined in a windowless warehouse. In others, they are encaged behind chain-link fences. In some camps, there are no hot meals. There are outbreaks of chickenpox, flu, measles, scabies and mumps, and ...”

“... gangrenous leg: the result of undiagnosed diabetes. Aurelia moved Sylvia and her younger brother, Warren, to Wellesley, Massachusetts, so that her parents could help while she went out to work. At 13, Plath wrote to her mother from summer camp nearly every day. Always prone to losing weight, she reassured Aurelia by listing everything she ate (‘Two bowls of ...”

“... had come about, not through vile Occidental cunning, but by chance. When the Governor, Sir Mark Young, emerged from a Japanese prison camp in 1945, he brought out a plan to empower Hong Kong to run some of its own affairs, on a basis of one ratepayer (literate in English or Chinese), one vote, as part of the leisurely run-up to self-rule that was normal in ...”