“... Most of Swift’s contributions are included in the standard edition of his prose writings, but we now have the full run in a distinguished edition by James Woolley. It is now possible, without visiting rare book libraries, to read the essays of both men in their original context, with their relation to one another in clear view. Sheridan’s (hopelessly ...”

“... as well as stabilisers of cadmium or lead. A trip to the tent might be more millennial than we bargained for, gifting us with an interesting catalogue of tissue-destroying mutations. The hint was loud: if we didn’t go home with webbed feet we’d been shortchanged. So PVC with its ...”

“... The king as a father, whose care necessitated obedience, was a compelling and acceptable precept. We might see Cordelia’s rebellion against King Lear – defying not only her father but also her king – as heroic, but many early moderns would have considered it dangerously disobedient and a harbinger of chaos. As the descendant of Henry VII on both his ...”

“... Grit and Glamour of an Icon’. She has interviewed more than 250 people, starting with the late John Warner (Taylor’s penultimate husband, a Republican senator) and her book reads like an extended feature for Vanity Fair. We learn that Bob Dylan adored her in Raintree County and that David Lynch kissed her after the ...”

“... I’d invited Bev to go with me to San Diego – Blakey was flying off to visit her dad – and so we ended up taking Bev’s cushy, landau-like Ford Taurus, the tiny trunk of my two-seater being comically insufficient for everything that needed transporting: a Santa-Claus-sized sackful of presents for my mother and the cats; numerous bottles of boutique olive ...”

“... and she liked him as a man’. Now she oversaw the poet’s legacy with canniness and care. When John MacBride, Maud Gonne’s estranged husband, was executed after the 1916 Rising in Dublin, Yeats talked once more of marriage to Maud Gonne, and then became involved with her daughter Iseult, to whom he also proposed. Joseph Hone writes about this in his ...”

“... your very cells, and Astrid shifts on the hard pew, moist and restless. She had sex yesterday with Dean de Wet in one of the cells down at the stables, and it was beautiful, despite the smell of fresh dung. The horse stamped and huffed in a neighbouring stall, rustling the straw with his hooves. Shit, that’s what it is, thinks Anton, all of it is ...”

“... to sell but caught the attention of established writers including Hamlin Garland and William Dean Howells. A life​ of Crane at this point becomes a narrative with three themes: things written and published, a daily struggle for money, and restless travels in search of experience and a place where he might settle and work. There is a frantic quality to ...”

“... noble American sense of mission before he reluctantly took his country into the European war. ‘We are provincials no longer,’ he famously declared in his second inaugural address in March 1917. Though still publicly opposed to American intervention in the war, he insisted that ‘our own fortunes as a nation are involved whether ...”

“... as I wandered in the Plaza Real, I set about enticing two nice Catalan boys back to my flat. As we had a drink, they explained that they had joined the Socialist Party and were going to meetings twice a week and putting up posters. They had joined, they said, because they were demanding rights for homosexuals and believed that the socialists would deliver ...”

“... on the deal that I had signed with Andrew under duress … The head of the record company [Mark Dean of Innervision] turns up with these contracts and we go to this greasy spoon café and he says: ‘Look, if you don’t sign this now, the deal is going away, you won’t have finished demos to take away with you, you ...”

“... entirely to believe in a film until it actually happens, it does seem likely that this autumn we will be shooting The Lady in the Van. This is the story of Miss Mary Shepherd, the elderly eccentric who took up residence in my garden in 1974, living there in a van until her death 15 years later. Maggie Smith played Miss Shepherd on the stage in 1999 and ...”

“... two monumental Transgender Studies readers, published in 2006 and 2013, however obsessed we may be with the most glamorous instances, most transsexual lives ‘are not fabulous’. In 2013 the level of unemployment among trans people in the US was reported to be 14 per cent, double the level in the general population; 44 per cent were ...”

“... ball, but once you leave hospital, the GP becomes your access to any help,’ she explained. ‘We fell foul of a lot of reforms that have taken place.’ Fisher was 48 when he died, ‘an influential writer, music blogger and university lecturer’, the Ipswich Star reported, who taught in the Visual Cultures department at Goldsmiths in South-East ...”

“... his pants to be held up by suspenders? The decisions, and the colouration, are irrevocable. So we might fantasise the translator of our dreams: someone, naturally, who admires the novel and its author, and who sympathises with its heroine; a woman, perhaps, to help us better navigate the sexual politics of the time; someone with excellent French and better ...”