“... likely extent of his readers’ acquirements. A great many people know that dentists commonly wear white jackets; a smaller but still substantial section of society has had the opportunity of observing that stewards on passenger aircraft are (or at one time were) similarly attired. Almost anybody of sufficient education to find the word ‘haemophilia’ even ...”

“... Catherine, are not signs of paranoia: for Daud is a black Muslim from Tanzania, and most of the white locals are either patronising or unforthcoming or directly hostile about ‘coons and wogs and smelly niggers’. The special intelligence of Gurnah’s novel is to realise that the psychological damage caused by real persecution need be no less serious ...”

“... He was one of more than 150,000 refugees – the sad remains of General Wrangel’s defeated White Army, along with any civilians who managed to make it on board – on a fleet of 126 ships. Like many of them, Gazdanov ended up in an overcrowded camp in Gallipoli funded by the French. France had bet on the wrong side in the Civil War, and was eager to ...”

“... at those diversity sessions: prized less for what she said than for her presence, which made the white faculty feel better. The colleges were zones of ‘conditional hospitality’, a phrase of Derrida’s that Kapil came across in Sara Ahmed’s On Being Included. ‘People of colour in white organisations are treated as ...”

“... a branded PVC sports holdall from Adidas, Gola or Puma, might just as well have dressed him ‘in white ankle socks and Mary Janes’, as if that particular combination was the most shame-saturated thing that could be imagined. The disturbingly mixed signals are neutralised to some extent by explanatory psychodrama. He gives his female persona a name (...”

“... searched by the police when taking the train into Paris. After NDiaye co-wrote the screenplay for White Material with Claire Denis, she noticed that people made different assumptions about them. Denis was raised in French colonial Africa and spent her childhood between Senegal, Cameroon and Burkina Faso. But it was NDiaye ...”

“... their new friends Edward and Jane Williams, their children and servants, and Mary’s half-sister, Claire Clairmont.Clairmont’s five-year-old daughter with Byron, Allegra, had died of typhus (or possibly malaria) only a few days earlier, in the convent near Ravenna where her father had more or less abandoned her. Percy Shelley had been fond of the ...”

“... quotations from Mansfield’s letters and diaries tend to be all over the place too. The title of Claire Harman’s biography, All Sorts of Lives, points to the volatility of her subject and the difficulty of her task. But at least some facts are incontrovertible. The Beauchamps had five children who survived infancy; Kathleen was in the middle. Her father ...”

“... Il Figlio dell’Uomo’, ‘The Son of Man’, an essay by Natalia Ginzburg written in 1946 for the paper Unita, begins: ‘There has been a war and people have seen so many houses reduced to rubble that they no longer feel safe in their own homes which once seemed so quiet and secure. This is something that is incurable and will never be cured no matter how many years go by ...”

“... Eleanor Roosevelt found her ‘hard as steel’, and she wasn’t wrong: asked at a White House dinner in 1942 how strikers were dealt with in China, Meiling drew a fingernail across her throat. Her superior attitude flowed naturally from her birth in 1898 into the influential Soong family of Shanghai. Her eldest sister, Ailing, married the ...”

“... cerebral, mostly female leads, here she’s more prepared to tease. There’s harassed, OCD-ish Claire, for instance, who, given an hour’s reprieve from her small children, wastes the time fretting about how to use it. Or befuddled but sagacious Mary, who believes that ‘getting married is like voting … whatever you choose the outcome will be at best ...”

“... our tiny book club. One of the books Carmen praised wholeheartedly was Small Things like These: Claire Keegan’s vicious and hypocritical nuns epitomised exactly what she found objectionable. 1960s-70s. Virago was a huge achievement, justly celebrated. The publishing house grew out of Carmen’s involvement in the underground press of the 1960s, alongside ...”

“... been on holiday, and heading to Paris, where she worked as a magazine illustrator – for Marie-Claire, among others. She took the backroads to avoid the traffic and stopped for the night in an obscure village. The following morning, she got her bike down from the car and toured the neighbourhood. She was eyed with suspicion by a five-year-old girl walking ...”

“... and the book appeared in 1952. It was called ‘The Price of Salt’ and was said to be by Claire Morgan; it received ‘respectable’ reviews, piles of fan mail, and sold a million copies in paperback. It is a romance which reads almost exactly like a Patricia Highsmith thriller. Highsmith got the idea for Carol in 1948, when she was 27. She had ...”

“... time, delight in a two-channel video titled Good Boy Bad Boy (1985), in which a black man and a white woman conjugate, at times sweetly, at other times furiously, such verbs as ‘shit’ and ‘fuck’: ‘I shit, you shit, we shit, this is shitting …’ The boys found it hilarious, scandalous, and scary all at once, and I like to think that they ...”