“... of another critic, who had just returned to London from the Berlin Film Festival. Over dinner he took pleasure in regaling us with stories of the male to female transsexual prostitutes he had met on the city’s streets, and how difficult it was to ‘complete’ the transaction since the transsexual body interprets the surgically created vagina as a wound ...”

“... all sorts of things, root and branch, it sometimes seems that the one constant was the pride she took in being a good socialist of a quite straightforward sort. (It seems, from Gordon’s account, that socialism was just about the only thing Carter wanted to inherit from her mother, a lifelong Labour supporter. Unlike her adored father, who had been, she was ...”

“... it does lead, I think, young people to have a legitimate question, you know, should …’ she took a moment to get the wording right: ‘Is it OK to still have children?’ Her comment spawned a flurry of pieces on why you should or should not procreate. But the thorny question of whether it is OK to have children – a question about what we owe one ...”

“... to be sure of a decent living in East Anglia. I went to see Agnew one May morning. Google Maps took me west out of Norwich on a fast road screened by trees from the countryside, then ushered me into the dense latticework of lanes on either side of the highway. It was hard to get a sense of the land beyond the hedgerows and woods and shaggy verges, but ...”

“... Intellectuals and the Masses (1992), his influential study of elitism in 20th-century literature, John Carey writes about the ‘duplicity’ of Joyce’s Ulysses, a novel supposedly about love for the common man, but written in such a forbidding way that the common man is unlikely to read it. Well, The Lord of the Rings is the opposite. It is a work written ...”

“... Lady Diana Cooper and countless other hedonistic Jazz Age types, Murphy, de Acosta and Garland took the right to play for granted, as well they might. Puritanism was an anachronism and in some renovated pagan sense tiresome and offensive too. In Cohen’s view, no doubt the most interesting thing her trio of subjects shared was an unorthodox ‘set of ...”

“... At Windsor it was the evening of the state banquet and as the president of France took his place beside Her Majesty, the royal family formed up behind and the procession slowly moved off and through into the Waterloo Chamber. ‘Now that I have you to myself,’ said the Queen, smiling to left and right as they glided through the glittering throng, ‘I’ve been longing to ask you about the writer Jean Genet ...”

“... a whodunnit with a romantic agenda. Not far into her sequence of Adamsberg books Vargas took the risk, with her detective – magnetic despite the scruffiness – having an affair with Camille Forestier, not a waitress/actress but that rarer hybrid, a musician/plumber. In Seeking Whom He May Devour (1999, translated 2004) it was Camille, on her ...”

“... the Persians, or perhaps by a renegade Roman soldier. Others believed God had taken no chances. John Malalas, the author of a sixth-century chronicle of the world that began with the Creation, reported a dream in which a bishop transported to heaven witnessed an enthroned Christ instruct the martyr-saint Mercurius: ‘Go forth and kill the emperor ...”

“... of the sort that his more literal-minded admirers expected to find. Demobbed in 1946, he took up his deferred place at Harvard where, with what he came to consider a ‘hysterical disregard for practicality’, he decided to major in French. For his English classes he wrote Firbankian short stories in a manner an unsympathetic tutor described as ...”

“... looking at Michael’s hands on the wheel and thinking how much nicer they are than my hands.*‘John Lennon,’ Michael said. ‘That’s the first thing Mum remembers, him being shot.’I said, ‘Is it?’‘Well, that’s what you told me.’Maureen is doing her homework. ‘It’s Miss Macaulay,’ said Michael. ‘Milestones. We did it two years ...”

“... Mare hero-worshipped Hardy, whom he first visited at Max Gate in June 1921. As was his wont, Hardy took him to the graves of Emma and his parents and sister in Stinsford churchyard, where de la Mare watched him scrape off the moss from their tombstones with a homemade implement contrived for that purpose. They shared an interest in ghosts and graveyards, in ...”

“... besides. When the Bill making the registration of births compulsory was introduced in 1836, Lord John Russell, recommending it to Parliament, said that everyone would ‘so soon perceive the benefit of having their children’s names inserted in the general register that it would not be very long before every one would be willing to concur in carrying out ...”

“... of port, the quiet converse of enlightened men!’ It is not surprising the signalman’s son took this amiss. In fact, Edward had admirably explained his address. Speaking of ‘genuine communication’, Raymond had said: ‘You can feel the pause and effort; the necessary openness and honesty of a man listening to another, in good faith, and then ...”

“... thought and action. It may even re-create that necessary illusion which scientific explanation took away, the illusion of human freedom. The third intellectual motive behind this kind of criticism contradicts such speculations. If it is combined with them, it is because the seekers after ‘human’ understanding have been reluctant to relinquish, in their ...”