“... mean Frank Sinatra and Studio 54, it meant Alfred Kazin and Lionel Trilling, Lillian Hellman and Susan Sontag. I loved its papers, the swagger of the contributors, the New York intellectuals, with their neuroses, their arguments, their marriages, and their parties. Wilson’s disagreement with Nabokov, Lillian’s fight with Mary, and Norman’s fights with ...”

“... is not the reason I, for one, read history. You can admire Hinton’s achievement but still look forward to historians bringing some rather different questions to the Mass Observation ...”

“... gap between getting out of the shower and putting on clothes. Instead she wonders: who will come forward next with information about a hidden corner of X’s life? Who was I to her? Who am I if she is dead? X turns out to have concealed many existences from her accidental biographer. You might already have noticed something about Lucca’s voice: it is not ...”

“... Medical Aid for Palestinians came into being in 1984. This programme sponsored Pauline Cutting, Susan Wighton and the rest of the volunteers from nine nations whose efforts are commemorated in this book. The decision to send medical volunteers to work in these conditions was a difficult one. It would have been so much simpler just to raise the money and ...”

“... a different if parallel road. Lonsdale himself seems to think at times in those terms, and is not forward to note the effect of women poets upon the major males. To take a single example, in his printing of Elizabeth Singer Rowe’s ‘Upon the Death of her Husband’ as taken from the second edition of ‘Eloisa to Abelard’, he encourages the inference ...”

“... two teachers at the local secondary modern are disturbed by the behaviour of a pupil called Susan, and investigate. Susan turns out to be the granddaughter and travelling companion of a strange old man, known only as the Doctor – she was made a relative, it is said, because the writer was uncomfortable with the ...”

“... give a range of ages, occupations and habitations. The stories are so arranged as to bring forward analogies of subject that focus in several instances considerable differences of treatment. Oliver Sacks’s stirring ‘The Leg’, a true story of paralysis which deals in eloquently measured prose with, the author’s loss of the sense of his left ...”

“... drafts, second thoughts, cancelled readings and emendations), accompanied by a fanfare of notes; Susan Shatto’s edition of ‘Maud’, devoting yet more minute attention to this single work (it is unhappily labelled ‘a definitive edition’ – what on earth is the indefinite article doing there?); and the highly-praised Lang-Shannon edition of ...”

“... his wife, Ruth, among his students; the school also proved a springboard for an astonishingly forward-looking research agenda. At a time when white scholars of Africa wrote mostly from imperial records, Bunche went to see for himself. For a dissertation on the impact of League of Nations oversight on colonial administration, he chose as his case studies ...”

“... Landis has set out the rooms to argue for the unsung importance of costume; the show puts forward detailed insider knowledge, with four veteran Hollywood designers – all of them women – specially featured: Edith Head (d. 1981), for example, who worked with Hitchcock, is responsible for that neat-as-a-pin look that does so much to sharpen fears of ...”

“... women writers.’ Furthermore, he told a large audience, ‘there are not that many women, like Susan Sontag, who are intellectuals first, poets and novelists second.’ Since ‘more men ... are deeply interested in intellectual matters than women,’ he concluded, to have invited more women simply for the sake of fairness would have meant ‘lowering the ...”

“... in much the same way as Shakespeare’s – by Tracey Chevalier in Girl with a Pearl Earring and Susan Vreeland in the latter part of Girl in Hyacinth Blue incline to a more sentimental view of the painter. Both are descendants of what George Eliot called (in her essay ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’) ‘the modern-antique species, which unfolds to us ...”

“... ran away to France. (The voluptuous Mrs Fuseli refused to share her husband with this strangely forward former prude and threw her out of the house, an experience that taught Wollstonecraft how to behave when, years later, a married woman herself, she had occasion to forbid an importunate Miss Pinkerton from harassing her not altogether unwilling husband ...”

“... war, we are at conflict ... I am reading Scoop by a woman called Evelyn Waugh’). There are steps forward, too, into adult experience. He runs away from home, getting as far as Manchester, although his disappearance seems to cause no stir – nothing about him on the Six O’Clock News – and he has to write a card addressed to himself: ‘Come ...”

“... who really does have a ‘heart’) and she ‘died so grotesquely that her little body had fallen forward into the trunk’: but in this version she lies looking quite composed, on her back. Ford wanted the grotesquerie, and prepared for it by an anecdote about a cow, here omitted. Maisie must not, at this point, look like a Pre-Raphaelite Ophelia. In ...”