“... the converse of his famous ancestor. Even allowing for party rancour, Swift was not far off the mark when he accused her of ‘sordid avarice, disdainful pride and ungovernable rage’. Mary Wortley Montague, who counted herself a friend, described Sarah as ‘eternally disappointed and eternally fretting’. Labels like ‘virago’ and ‘termagant’ may ...”

“... that case where the hell was I? but what instead did I want it to sound like? Schwartz made his mark just before the Second World War when Modernism was at its most popular, and it was in this tradition that Allen Tate saw his first book, In dreams begin responsibilities, when it came out in 1938, hailing it as ‘beyond any doubt the first real innovation ...”

“... rebuke to the ideal. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the number of single mothers in this country rose faster than at any other time in history, seemingly unaffected by an increasingly strident Conservative rhetoric of blame. The most pervasive image was of an unemployed teenager who had deliberately got herself pregnant in order to claim benefits, although ...”

“... If Gypsy Rose Lee had been born about 60 years later than she was, she would most probably have had a reality show, something like Keeping Up with the Kardashians, which is about three Los Angeles sisters whose sex tapes have a curious habit of ‘leaking’ onto the internet. Their mother, Kris, is their manager and when Kris is not calling her pornographer friend in prison, she can usually be found encouraging her daughters to take their clothes off in front of men, or, most recently, arranging the telecast of one daughter’s wedding to a basketball player she’d known for exactly one month ...”

“... As Yiannis Boutaris, the city’s charismatic mayor, approached the podium twenty young people rose from their seats chanting slogans. It was hard to read the black banner they tried to unfurl. The letters ‘YFANET’ meant nothing to me, but ‘No to the State’ provided a clue. Mainstream politics might be in retreat in Greece but anarchism is alive ...”

“... generating both sophisticated psychoanalytical readings, such as those put forward by Jacqueline Rose in The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (1991), and the schlock movie Sylvia (2003), in which Hughes was played by Daniel Craig and Plath by Gwyneth Paltrow. From the early 1970s more or less until his death Hughes was a major hate figure for those he and his ...”

“... from Wimbledon for designing too-saucy dresses for tennis women (Teddy Tinling); a third, who rose from private in the Honourable Artillery Company, was a devout Christian who launched the Hammer House of Horror (Sir James Carreras). All demonstrated that a spell in uniform, as the sovereign’s trusty and well-beloved, never cramped a creative ...”

“... and thereby denied them legal recognition of their gender. In 1986, female-to-male transsexual Mark Rees, in the first challenge to the ruling, lost his case at the European Court of Human Rights against the UK government for its non-recognition of his status as male, loss of privacy and barring his marriage to a woman. Only with the Gender Recognition Act ...”

“... holding your breath, watching, waiting for your man to show. I’m in the garden picking you a rose. This new strain with their frantic, crimson heads, open now and at their very best, having dozed all winter in a deep, rich bed, the trench I sank one evening by the potting shed. I mark the best bloom, take it at the ...”

“... British killers – Ian Brady (See No Evil), John Christie (Rillington Place), the Wests (Fred and Rose), Dennis Nilsen (Des), Jeremy Bamber (White House Farm), Harold Shipman (Doctor Death) – while American true crime favours American atrocities. I don’t see my preference for the British product as some kind of weird patriotism. It’s written into the ...”

“... Steven Rose is a well-known public scientist who has dedicated his career to the study of brains. He has lived through the early days of the technical revolution that has involved increasingly powerful ways of imaging activity in the brain. But he is first of all a biologist. His guiding principle is that we cannot understand the human brain unless we understand how it came into being ...”

“... friend sneaked me into the Unprofor headquarters in a villa in the centre of town. General Michael Rose was away in Pale, we were told, negotiating with the Serbs. We were shown into a bedroom, now used as Rose’s private office. A Royal Marine sat back in the general’s chair, feet on the desk, his head hidden behind a ...”

“... reminds me of wading birds, when their beaks meet their beaks as they feed on a mirror of mud and mark ‘Here’ as a point in the water that’s deep in the sky. Fetch me a folding chair. Set it up by the south door. This is etiquette. I am the ticket collector. Nothing comes in but thistledown which scarcely touches the floor and was never supposed to ...”

“... Obviously most of the material is drawn from the canonical gospels of Matthew and Luke, with Mark behind them and John ignoring them. They offer accounts of the infancy of Jesus that are often quite wildly at odds with one another, but anyone wanting to retell the tale can pick and choose, ignoring conflicts of testimony and adding more if desired. It ...”

“... self-made father with connections in Hollywood, Wall Street, Washington and London, and by Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, a devout but fashionable Catholic mum, as at home on the golf links or the ski slopes as in Windsor Castle. After making millions in banking, real estate and film distribution, the father wants to devote his life to public service, and to ...”