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“... was one of those well-meaning white people looking forward to seeing Barack Obama eulogise Nelson Mandela so that I could feel better about the world, only I was the person tasked with writing the eulogy.’ In the end, unsatisfied with Rhodes’s draft, Obama writes the speech himself. It is much better, but now it is Rhodes’s turn to be ...”

“... Brown, what’s really ‘curious’ about assisted reproduction technologies, as the sociologist Sarah Franklin has written, is how quickly they have come to seem so normal. These technologies do not just produce babies, but normality itself, and its main components: mothers, fathers, parents, families, races, nations, societies and cultures, not to mention ...”

“... for hours with my next child – the certainty that I was dying.‘To let the baby out,’ Maggie Nelson writes, ‘you have to be willing to go to pieces.’ ‘Just this is miraculous,’ Carole Maso writes. ‘That I ploughed without illusion towards death. Even as I gave life.’ Not everyone describes birth as an encounter with death: there are ecstatic ...”

“... had contained a sympathetic portrait of a damaged but vital woman, under the name of Martha. Lucy Nelson, the central figure of his next novel, When She Was Good (1967), is just as damaged but also perversely destructive of herself and others, no longer a valiant survivor. She freezes to death on a winter’s night, having driven away anyone who might care ...”