“... It was shaping up​ to be the publishing event of the year, the first blast of post-pandemica as we emerged from our hobbit holes and combed the cobwebs from our hair: the starship arrival of Blake Bailey’s authorised biography of Philip Roth, Philip Roth: The Biography. The ‘the’ of the subtitle said: accept no substitutes ...”

“... was the funeral of China’s revolutionary era. At that moment, the curtain was lifted on the post-revolutionary age.’Chen’s biography draws on a breadth of sources that is not just a tribute to his decades of research, but a revelation of the extent of materials – documents from party and state archives, personal memoirs, monographs, interviews ...”

“... Mediterranean, written when he was 24, he spoke of himself as an Englishman. Later he accepted the post invented for him as Surgeon Oculist in Ordinary to the Queen. (She must not have known about his dirty fingernails.) He accepted a knighthood in 1864. Many accounts were subsequently written of the Wildes entertaining in their house in Merrion Square. Shaw ...”

“... was the one labelled “everyone is at risk.”’ An obvious fact was forever being obscured. As Jonathan Mann, the founder of the Word Health Organisation’s Global Programme on Aids, told a London audience in 1993, the spread of HIV is strongly determined by an identifiable societal risk factor … the scope, intensity and nature of discrimination which ...”

“... parents had reservations when the couple got engaged in 1878: he had no notable ancestors, save Jonathan Edwards (who was only a distant relation); his means were modest and there was a family history of mental illness. Mabel, however, found it in herself to overlook all this. Her first requirement in a husband was sympathy to her ambitions. ‘No man can ...”