“... Hugh Trevor-Roper and Briggs, leaving only Eric Hobsbawm to Richard Evans. Briggs’s widow, Susan, commissioned Sisman to write this Life, and in fact the man himself noted before his death in 2016 that if there had to be a biography, Sisman would be the right person to do it. The result is an elaborately detailed and affectionate account that leaves a ...”

“... is not new. The patchwork made in his spare time in the decade between 1842 and 1852 by James Williams, a Welsh tailor, shows Cain and Abel, Noah and his ark and no end of animals. It also applauds modern engineering with representations of the Menai suspension bridge and the Cefn viaduct. There are patriotic and religious quilts which would elevate your ...”

“... Several​ of the last century’s finest non-fiction writers – Joan Didion, Susan Sontag, James Baldwin – longed to be novelists. In interviews with the Paris Review, each touched on the tension and insecurity involved in their dual métier. Sontag wrote in surprisingly aspirational tones of ‘the novelist [I’d] finally given myself permission to be ...”

“... intellectuals and scholars (Alain Locke, Rayford Logan, Merze Tate, E. Franklin Frazier, Eric Williams) who together would subject the global racial order to excoriating analysis.Bunche spent a dozen years at Howard, finding his wife, Ruth, among his students; the school also proved a springboard for an astonishingly forward-looking research agenda. At a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... To be fair, there were some men she liked. They tended to be showbusiness people. She liked Robin Williams, Charlie Chaplin, Tommy Lee Jones and Al Pacino. She also liked Salinger. (‘Jerry’ had been a friend since the 1950s and Lillian could sometimes sound like a female Holden Caulfield, railing against the phonies.) She got a fine awareness of ‘the ...”

“... in the US when it wasn’t. His response was to talk and to write, just as relentlessly. Tennessee Williams, who first met Vidal in Rome in 1948, the year the CIA orchestrated the outcome of the Italian elections, said: ‘I wonder if any other living writer is going to keep at it as ferociously, unremittingly as Vidal. He has a mania for bringing out one book ...”

“... This alternative Soviet strategy puts Zaslavskaya in the camp of Tawney, Tony Crosland and Shirley Williams and the kindlier tradition of democratic socialism: ‘The task of a socialist society is to retain the advantages of centralised economic planning, while at the same time finding ways of combining it with a greater stimulation of market ...”

“... prizes in the League of Nations essay competition two years in a row, beating the young Raymond Williams the second time around. From BMB Murdoch learned, too, an admiration for the Soviet Union which the evidence of Stalin’s purges and show trials could not shake; her Soviet sympathies outlasted her pacifism by some years.It was only in retrospect that ...”

“... beliefs and desires in order to interpret their values, but it can be argued, as it has been by Susan Hurley, that we must, equally, ascribe some values to them even in the course of crediting them with desires or preferences, because it is only by reference to some sense of their values, of what they think worthwhile, that we can ascribe to them a rational ...”

“... message on my Facebook Wall. Self-destructive thoughts when forced to admit they can’t. Like Susan Boyle, all one wants is to have one’s little life back. B., thank god, seems fine. Calls frequently from Cambridge on the Crackberry; thinks I’m making an insane fuss about moving five houses up the street. Full of kind spousal forbearance when I tell ...”

“... morality can be grounded as Kant contended, but leaves open the question as to whether it can. Susan Wolf thinks that morality has no one supreme principle, but that Kant identifies moral considerations of prime importance – autonomy above all – that compete, at times tragically, with other moral considerations such as welfare. Allen Wood objects to ...”

“... nor loyalists to tell the truth, while 92 per cent didn’t trust the British state either. As Susan McKay describes in Bear in Mind These Dead (2008), nationalist and unionist communities have both at times brandished their grief at one another; in the mid-2000s, they held rival victims’ demonstrations in Belfast and Dublin respectively. Even agreeing ...”

“... between two temperaments, two consciences and almost two epochs,’ Father and Son begins.) Susan Cheever says she once had another title for her memoir, Treetops; it was ‘Three Great Men and the Women They Destroyed’. Yet the first book she wrote about her father, Home before Dark, left her reeling at the variety of her discoveries. ‘I don’t ...”

“... so much ‘meaty pay dirt’ as the stuff of daytime television with odd touches of Tennessee Williams: He looks so sweaty and ugly, which, I mean we all do when we are desperate and looked at with no feeling, I know that. Desire makes us ugly unless the other person is lost to it too … It is like watching a movie. But it is me, I feel this ...”