“... anxieties, projections, phantasmagoria – things to which women are particularly prone. In the first week of 2013 I started to count, in an idling way, the number of books by women reviewed in the weekly arts pages of the Irish Times and found none. They were all by men. There was a short interview with a woman, Mary Costello, a writer whose sentences are ...”

“... previous life, it allowed her to have sex with the Director of the Institute on his desk, after first clearing away the more fragile maps and genealogies that covered it. Alone and unobserved on the island, she is given a bit more slack: it’s enough that she is free to walk outside to visit her charge, bring it its ration of kibble, look it full in the ...”

“... the celebrity, wealth and critical admiration she earned over a long and charmed career – her first suspense novel, Strangers on a Train (1950), published when she was 29, was an immediate bestseller, and she rolled on from there – her life looks from one angle like the most horrible botch: a concatenation of private misery and psychic turmoil for ...”

“... Year’s Eve won’t be until 2028 so it’s the last one I shall ever see – and it’s also the first that I ever knew about. The moon is strong enough to cast sharp shadows, with the sky blue except for occasional reefs of cloud so that with the snow still lying in drifts on the road earth and heaven seem one. 23 January. To the National where I watch the ...”

“... she took with her, when he was two, to London from Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) along with her first finished manuscript, The Grass Is Singing. The two packages are always mentioned together. The manuscript was in the suitcase she carried, they say. The child is always noted, but in these mini-biographies or profiles, left to tag along. Did Peter hold ...”

“... one don was said to wear a black armband on the anniversary of the day in 1978 when women were first admitted to the college.)Behind nearly every woman philosopher in the period before the widespread admission of women to academic institutions was a man willing to provide access to an education otherwise denied. In many cases this was her father: we might ...”

“... primordial: the assertion that a broken country can be fixed with sufficient state violence.At first, Bukele’s rise appears to follow a familiar pattern: a privileged member of the ruling class opportunistically breaks with it and poses as an anti-establishment force. Born in 1981 to a millionaire father with sprawling business interests and a taste for ...”

“... Newell, who wanted Rupert to do a bit of work for the role of David Blakely, the guy killed by Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in England. Newell wanted to see Rupert’s pain. But, as Rupert himself admits, he was ‘a riddle as an actor. On screen, I had a lot of “feeling” but I couldn’t really act. On stage I could act, but people said I ...”

“... unheard of, would take some figuring out. The emotional generosity and sense of adventure that had first drawn them together would – just about – see them through an enduring creative and domestic partnership extraordinary by any standards. And yet there’s a warning note in that apparent complicity, however playful, with Faithfull’s emphasis on what ...”

“... gushed about it to his long-suffering fiancée, Martha Bernays: How that Sarah plays! After the first words of her lovely, vibrant voice I felt I had known her for years. Nothing she could have said would have surprised me; I believed at once everything she said … I have never seen a more comical figure than Sarah in the second act, where she appears in a ...”

“... coal-mining company. He is now the head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). In his first speech in his new position, Wheeler said: ‘I get frustrated with the media when they report I was a coal lobbyist.’)*It is revealed that President Trump told a visiting group of Spanish ministers that Spain should build a wall across the entire Sahara ...”

“... advice to ‘act out his sexual impulses’. He began a public affair with a 26-year-old called Ruth Kligman. One afternoon in August 1956, Kligman brought a friend along on the trip out to Amagansett, expecting Pollock to take them to the beach. Instead, Pollock dragged them to a bar, where they spent the afternoon watching him drink. On the way home his ...”

“... the thought that the Union might dissolve. This plea came immediately after the appearance of the first poll to put the independence campaign in the lead, which Cameron says hit ‘him like a blow to the solar plexus’. If nothing else, getting the monarch involved shows that Cameron was perfectly prepared to make up his own rules when it suited him. We have ...”

“... found finding each other by wandering solitary or in pairs in and out of pubs and clubs in Soho. First stop was the Highlander: you popped your head round the door, and if no one to your taste was there, the French Pub was next, just down the road. In the afternoons, when the pubs were closed by law to protect the livers of the land, it was over to the ...”

“... wanted a bone. Didion’s relationship with the blues was one of the things that defined her.On first reading Didion’s bare, undigested notes from those sessions, I felt that the therapeutic drama was like a production of Ibsen’s The Wild Duck as directed by John Cassavetes. Between MacKinnon and Didion, the process of interviewing must have been pretty ...”