“... 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 ...”

“... his nomination. The stakes are very high and the Democratic minority should be careful. In the first instance it should determine whether the president has nominated a traditional conservative or a radical neo-con. Above all else, it must oppose any ‘stealth’ candidate whose record is so undistinguished that his judicial philosophy remains ...”

“... Victorians encumbered with all the baggage of that era. They had done their best work before the first war and were no doubt grateful to be granted a further chance. Among them were, as well as Blomfield, H.V. Lanchester and Herbert Baker, remembered, if at all, as the subject of Lutyens’s gaunt jest ‘I met my Bakerloo.’ Despite their insularity and ...”

“... nothing so diminishing, to the canonical view, though anyone who has witnessed this sort of loss first-hand knows that it puts you among the Greeks, into Shakespeare. ‘I have spent most of my life writing against The Winter’s Tale,’ Byatt said. To have in your life a problem play, to have it be a problem play because of your life.As David Mitchell ...”

“... it seems about time for something normal. The Plath-Hughes mythology presents a problem if the first glimpse you had of Plath’s life was the one she lived while making her poems. That life, those mornings, is never to be pitied. Asked what she found most surprising about Plath as she worked, Clark responded: ‘Her force.’ This in turn surprised ...”

“... it meant to keep her there for a quarter of a century, is perplexing in a different way (in his first account of himself, Fritzl said he was ‘probably a monster’ – probably). Freud characterised the unconscious as without temporal extension. Fantasies expressive of unconscious desires do not exist in time. Above ground, Josef Fritzl obeyed the rules ...”

“... the cavalry against the tanks.’It’s my bad luck that, being the age I am, the Hall I knew first was the New Times one. How disrespectful, I remember thinking, all that wafting around in language, talking about ‘deploying the cavalry’ when mounted police, equipped with riot shields and truncheons, had only recently been sent out to fight the ...”

“... the wrong pronouns: ‘she/her’ instead of ‘they/them’. They were studying with me for the first time, and the topic was feminism. Perhaps this makes my mistake seem especially egregious, which it was. As a university teacher, I haven’t yet adopted the practice of the ‘pronoun round’: going around a class or tutorial asking for everyone’s ...”

“... that relatively few works of great literary accomplishment were produced in America during the first half of the 19th century. While some of these are astonishing by any standards, there simply aren’t enough for a full course of study without the inclusion of other materials; and if the subject is to keep its American title, these must be home-grown ...”