“... problem: Labour’s terminal collapse in Scotland, combined with the distortions of the first-past-the-post system, have created structural conditions that make it impossible for Labour to win a majority without a swing of dramatic proportions. In 2015 it needed a swing of 4.6 per cent to win a majority of one; now, in order to achieve the same ...”

“... through her cervix to set off uterine contractions, and now she has to wait. We are on the first page of Annie Ernaux’s first novel, Les Armoires vides, and we are going to have to wait with her. In pregnancy, quickening refers to the first movements of the foetus in the ...”

“... a ubiquitous presence on the Holocaust ‘circuit’.In A Nation on Trial, a book written with Ruth Bettina Birn, I sought to expose the shoddiness of Goldhagen’s book. Birn, an authority on the archives Goldhagen consulted, first published her critical findings in Cambridge University’s Historical Journal. Refusing ...”

“... and later he married a girl I’d taught at another time, and I understand that I was their first shared passion.’ Imagine it: erotic unification over this man, someone who hated music in public places, fascists and Bolshevists, the feel of satin; who was dolphin-like in his movements, an obsessive self-googler before easy engines existed, who could ...”

“... nightingale is a thing of art and myth, an immortal whose song found out ‘the sad heart of Ruth’; but it is also a transient visitor to a Hampstead garden, which heedlessly slips out of earshot (‘Past the near meadows, over the still stream,/Up the hill-side’) and so brings Keats’s poem to an unpremeditated close. Carver’s poem sets about ...”

“... with the rubber tyre that was suspended from their ceiling.Hackenfeller’s Ape was Brophy’s first novel, published in 1953 when she was 23. In a preface written almost forty years later, she describes the flat she shared at the time with her friend Sally, close enough to the zoo to hear the lions roar. The novel tells the story of four days in the life ...”

“... the sense of lack of ‘ownership’ of the Human Rights Act was neither widespread nor deep. Our first public consultation confirmed this: the responses were broadly supportive of the status quo, with the caveat that most people wanted more rights for more people, not fewer rights for fewer people. Concerned that the results might be misleading, the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... for social conditioning over biological destiny. Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, which had also first appeared long before I read it, was decisive as well, though her vivid way with physical evocation was less encouraging than Malinowski and Mead’s utopian picture of possible liberty. Beauvoir’s grim plain-speaking put bodies – gynaecology and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Willem de Kooning​’s Suburb in Havana was painted in 1958. The canvas seems to have had its first showing at Sidney Janis’s gallery in New York, part of an exhibition called Eight American Painters that opened on 5 January 1959. Four days before, on New Year’s Day, Fidel Castro’s forces entered Havana. It had been clear for much of 1958 that the Batista regime was falling apart, with street fighting moving in from the suburbs of Havana all through the winter months ...”

“... 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 ...”