“... answer to the problem of death and to the crisis of meaning and values occasioned by the war. Three pieces – and a short story, ‘The House of the Famous Poet’ – describe her sudden feeling of writerly vocation while sheltering from V-1 bombs in Louis MacNeice’s house in 1944. Her calling was ‘intensified by … the knowledge that ...”

“... Morse, an angelic virgin from a bourgeois family which looks down on him because of his working-class background. Fame comes, but with a postscript: his friend Russ Brissenden, who writes with an ease that makes Martin envious, shoots himself in the head – writing, it turns out, wasn’t enough. Brissenden was based on the Bay Area poet George Sterling, a ...”

“... but thought of himself as Spanish. Cerreño came from a small town near Seville and a rural gentry class that was spiralling downwards along with Spain’s agricultural output. The liberalisation of trade in the last years of the 18th century offered these men opportunities: one as a slave-trader, the other as a sea captain. But Grandin’s most impressive ...”

“... one of its boldest acts when she had herself arrested disguised as ‘Jane Warton’, a working-class woman, to expose the government’s double standards. Earlier accounts of Constance’s life have claimed that she was interested in prison reform long before she became a suffragette, but Jenkins has found little evidence of that, or of any great interest ...”

“... of single-party rule in the South’. What preceded it, in the period immediately after the Civil War, was racial and partisan conflict. Trust and forbearance – without which democracy is precarious – were attainable only when the ideal of racial equality was discreetly shelved. The ‘toleration’ and ‘restraint’ which ‘served as the soft ...”

“... group of miserable and immiserated people into ‘a single undulating body’ where differences of class, opinion and identity fall away, and nobody looks at their phone. Despentes also vaguely gestures towards the idea of the park as belonging to no one and so to everyone, one of the only sites in the city not yet privatised, a commons in which people can be ...”

“... her local Green Party office and the rest of the week as a childminder for the white, upper-middle-class Chamberlain family. In making Emira work for a political party that makes almost no impression in a decidedly two-party country, Reid is telling us something about Emira’s marginal career prospects. She watches her friends achieve the stability that seems ...”

“... as a cake/an ordinary woman’. She sees Buffalo spread out across a landscape ‘potted as if by war’, made of weeds, boarded-up buildings, ‘the slivers of window abandoned/in the streets’. But even in a city damaged by poverty and violence, its communities condemned by ‘many moynihans’, there’s the possibility of ‘love and hope’ – and ...”

“... inclusivity were at the forefront of my mind, as well as shaking up all those outmoded notions of class that plague the UK especially … I was sick and tired of seeing so many people othered. And if we want to get real: I felt that Vogue had played some part in maintaining this state of affairs.’ It was a far different proposal from that made by his ...”

“... Vietnam Project’ announces: ‘I cannot help that.’ Reflecting on his role in Vietnam War propaganda, Dawn says: ‘I am not ashamed to name things by their names.’ Everett and Coetzee both view reasoning as circular or tautological, a human invention posing as a discovery about the nature of all things, as well as a source of rationalisations ...”

“... Their father was a physicist who studied with Einstein at Princeton until he was drafted into the war effort. This took him to a nuclear materials facility in Tennessee. There he met their mother, a ‘calutron girl’ working at Y-12, a plant for the electromagnetic separation of the uranium 235 isotope. After their divorce, both parents died of cancer. It ...”

“... theory. He had got to know André Breton when they were both in New York during the Second World War, and developed close friendships with Max Ernst, André Masson and others in Surrealist circles.) The chapter ends with a long account of formal game-playing in various indigenous American societies. There are many such complex detours in Wild Thought, and ...”

“... of the subject. Almost overnight a new philosophical literature emerged dealing with topics like war, abortion and affirmative action, and this was followed soon after, especially in the United States, by a proliferation of university classes on ‘contemporary moral problems’ and ‘applied ethics’. New work in meta-ethics was slower to appear, but the ...”

“... the witchhunter in his looking-glass; taking individual women out of their context, ignoring their class, place, work, family, to corral them in a realm of universal ascriptions constitutes the founding act of misogyny. All the books considered here wrestle with this problem, they reach for the particular moment, the detailed cluster of circumstances, the ...”

“... self-assertion – one of the intermittent sub-plots in her essays is a critique of the post-war, upper-middle-class English character – we get a vivid picture of an absolutely unendearing psychoanalytic orthodoxy. The establishment and its ‘rebels’ always do each other’s bidding, but Coltart has managed to ...”