“... philanthropists and reformers – Cavell is there, and so are Queens Victoria and Alexandra, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Angela Burdett-Coutts. St Joan’s International Alliance, a Catholic body that was founded by suffragettes and is recognised today by both the Vatican and the UN, celebrated its centenary in 2011, and still distinguishes itself by ...”

“... making out of their horror at her profit (an obvious point), not to say out of the horror they drew their readers into – given, that is, their own traffic in the pleasures of horror – we might, again shifting the terms, ask: what is the perverse profit of pleasure? How far is pleasure – the pleasure we take in celebrity, for example – bound up with ...”

“... the aim is ecstasy, the fantasy is death’ – but reprinted in book form, the parallels Sontag drew between the Nazi aesthetic and the physique of Nubian tribespeople seemed unpersuasive, leaned on, and the rhetoric overdone. ‘Fascinating Fascism’ formed a double feature in Saturn with ‘Syberberg’s Hitler’, Sontag’s heavy-lifting explication of ...”

“... who had been billed to play the lead role of Julio but was too ill from jaundice to appear. What drew the crowds to Double Falsehood was the involvement (in a manner of speaking) of another, even bigger theatrical star, for it was Theobald’s remarkable claim, teasingly publicised over the previous months, that his play was based on a hitherto unknown work ...”

“... his neck, kneeled in front of the young beauty this English soldier had brought back with him and drew the outline of her left foot and then her right on the paper he had asked her to stand on. She was 5’10”, very tall for an Italian, and had been nicknamed ‘the giraffe’ at home, where the much smaller local males found her height and thinness and ...”

“... Jolting miserably over the rough terrain, he began to wail. This – the thing I describe – drew a crowd. For his plight grew worse, yet his shouts were in a foreign language, desperately begging his ‘master’s mercy’. His funny way of talking made them laugh. His bodily contours, his fat suggested something alien, animal, Babylonian, gross. So the ...”

“... at a station in Cornwall. Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then, Standing as when I drew near to the town Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then, Even to the original air-blue gown! Hardy changed the last line from ‘Even to the original hat and gown’, which Tomalin calls ‘dull’, to the ‘original air-blue gown’, which ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... together until the age of three, at which point they were adopted into different families. She drew the Passmores – Frederick was an ‘auto-mechanic teacher’, and Mary was a ‘homemaker and former secretary’ whose own mother had died when she was born. They renamed their daughter Marian. ‘The Passmores didn’t like to talk about ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Then, with a look of horror beyond anything language could convey, she threw back her head and drew the edge of her palm quickly across her distended throat – and vanished.’In another memorable scene, Kit Carson’s wife tells Latour about Trinidad Lucero, a local man who may be the son of a priest in the area, Father Martinez. Lucero is also a member ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... place to live. ‘I guess recently there have been two hundred people at the support meetings,’ Elizabeth Wyatt, one of HASL’s founders, said when I met her again a few days later. ‘We had to close the group a year ago because of the sheer number of people coming … We have a list of legal aid housing lawyers, but when I give it to them, I feel totally ...”