“... in DIY self-pickling. Compared with Highsmith in her seventies, her fellow drunk-dyke genius Elizabeth Bishop looked like a fresh-blooming flower in her later years – a regular Goop-enhanced Gwyneth.Then there was the compulsive sexual promiscuity – a festival of glut, recrimination and endlessly renewed licentious squalor (I almost wrote ...”

“... comments to question the representativeness of her experience. They’d been taught the work of Elizabeth Anscombe and Philippa Foot in the 1980s! Could things be as bad as all that? ‘Probably not,’ someone called Brian replied.To suggest that a culture of sexism might be disproved by the presence of a few women who are granted exceptional status ...”

“... you can’t beat people who really believe in the traditional prescriptive stuff. Berger’s bleat drew a warm seconding letter from the reliably reactionary Elizabeth Jane Howard and her friend Sybille Bedford. If Berger had slyly blamed all the mayhem onto ‘the Rushdie affair’, these two went him one better in the ...”

“... Josephus, probably the only historian to have actually been in this physical sense a survivor, drew lots with his soldiers in a cave after the fall of the fortress he was commanding. They were to kill each other on this basis, but Josephus cooked the deal in such a way that he and one other man were left alive. ‘This is precisely what he brings the ...”

“... clayed cotton dress, and her arms and bare legs were sharp with metal down. The blenched hair drew her face tight to her skull as a tied mask; her features were baltic. The young man’s face was deeply shaded with soft short beard, and luminous with death. The impressive writing knows its impressiveness, but probably in this case was meant as caption ...”

“... irritating and so sent the equerry away in a bad temper. Reading more and more, the Queen now drew her books from various libraries, including some of her own, but for sentimental reasons and because she liked Mr Hutchings, she still occasionally made a trip down to the kitchen yard to patronise the travelling library. One Wednesday afternoon, though, it ...”

“... did not at the time commend itself to the prevailingly pious, who thought them scurrilous and drew biographical inferences from them. They did not confine themselves to the sexual infamies. Richardson added that ‘his brawls, his jarrs, his goals, his spunging-houses, are all drawn from what he has seen and known.’ Others added gaming, drinking and ...”

“... farmer, Cather took a story of ‘poor peasants’ – Mencken wrote approvingly in 1919 – and drew from it ‘the eternal tragedy of man’. Reviewing her early novels in the Nation, Carl Van Doren praised both her democratic outlook and ‘elemental’ vision of human suffering. ‘Passion blows through her chosen characters,’ he enthused, ‘like a ...”

“... came on the radio, lightly drumming the lace fringe along the top of her bodice. But what really drew me to Melodia, and encouraged my looking past her more outlandish affectations, was her taste for being tied up and sodomised, all the while muttering prayers in Latin that she had apparently been forced to commit to memory in the Midwest by the good Sisters ...”

“... in one of the very few ships leaving from Port Said. Micheline got berths on the troopship Queen Elizabeth. On 18 July, she left with her daughters from Cairo’s central station. It was a madhouse, the platforms were crammed with every sort of refugee, desperate to attach themselves to any part of a train, including the roof. Many of them were Jews who had ...”

“... finger to her lips (the man in the wardrobe now having mysteriously migrated to the bathroom), she drew him to the window to point at the fishman’s van, looking at him in fearful certainty, even triumph; he must surely see that the fate she feared, whatever it was, must soon engulf them both. Few nights passed uninterrupted and Dad would wake to find the ...”

“... the public and politicians that was once unthinkable.XR’s enthusiasm for a citizens’ assembly drew on precedents in Ireland and Canada. Last year France was added to the list, when Emmanuel Macron set up a citizens’ convention for ‘ecological transition’. In November, six House of Commons select committees issued invitations to thirty thousand ...”

“... He’s very personable.’ It wasn’t​ until my fifth visit to Leicestershire that the system drew back the curtain a fraction and I was able to meet Sanders, in a small conference room in a modern ten-storey office block near Leicester railway station, away from hospitals and clinics, on a floor that housed only NHS administrators. The decor was quite ...”

“... catch-all for homosexual activity. This was the city from which Wolfenden’s committee drew nearly all its evidence, and where the long labyrinthine process leading to decriminalisation would play out: a decade of delay, prevarication and slowly advancing opinion between his report and the change in the law.Wolfenden was a former public school ...”

“... the medical profession. In a 2020 article in the Journal of Medical Ethics on no-blame culture, Elizabeth Duthie and her co-authors wrote about a ‘real-life example’ of a nurse who met a patient’s family after she had made a mistake. The nurse was ‘remorseful, traumatised’, though the error had led to ‘no harm’; the patient’s wife was ...”