“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... against Delmore Schwartz. His mother, Rose, was to blame. After all, it was she who decided on his first name – the ‘crucial crime’, and an expression, he felt, of her ‘brazen gaucheness’, her botched attempt to assimilate into American society. ‘I never heard anybody call him “Schwartz”,’ Dwight Macdonald recalled. He was ...”

“... in fact the perfect plaintiff for Roe v. Wade, just not in the way her lawyers would have liked.At first, McCorvey wouldn’t talk to Prager unless he paid her $1000. Her story was her only asset, and it had supported her, however modestly, for years. Sarah Weddington, the lawyer who argued Roe at the Supreme Court and then parlayed her fame into a political ...”

“... to boarding school in England, after which she trained as a domestic science teacher and took her first job, teaching at the Liverpool Training School of Cookery and Technical College of Domestic Science. In 1910, at Toxteth, she married Philip Tinne, a local GP born in British Guiana and educated at Eton and Magdalen College, Oxford. The Tinnes were a ...”

“... new novel and negotiating the terms for its publication. Of the books already in print, only the first two, Typee and Omoo, had had much commercial success, and even Typee, which made him for a time a minor celebrity, had been criticised, as nearly all his works would be, for blasphemy and untruth, prompting his publishers to ask him to revise for the second ...”

“... his incendiary rhetoric with action. In January 1881 his followers exploded a bomb in Salford, the first time a bomb had been planted in Britain to further a political cause. The bomb destroyed some shops, injured a woman and killed a seven-year-old boy. The British authorities, who began to monitor O’Donovan Rossa’s activities in the United ...”