“... we shouldn’t be in too much of a hurry to charge Greek thought with misogyny. Motherhood, as Lauren Hackworth Petersen and Patricia Salzman-Mitchell insist in their collection of essays on mothering in the ancient world, was no less an ‘uncontested territory’ then than it is today. Instances abound of women cherished only as nurturers. In one version ...”

“... meta-story, is about aspiration, and about the ways in which Britain has and hasn’t changed. A working-class Catholic born in Liverpool in 1954, who became a driven and brilliant lawyer; a young man with no education, born in Wales in 1938 who went to sea at 17 and rose through the seamen’s union, via Ruskin College, to become an MP; a shammes’s son ...”

“... misidentified Dix’s problem. It isn’t that he’s brilliant but that he’s bored. He’s been working in Hollywood so long that he’s heard every story there is, and he doesn’t think life is any more generous with surprises. In the corridor of the police station, Dix is introduced to Henry Kesler, the suave banker who’d been dating the dead ...”

“... or behind me. I suspect he hated the walk. His Iranian gym shoes, with the label ‘Nike by Ralph Lauren’, rubbed his feet raw. He never complained but in the evenings I saw him trying various homeopathic remedies. He soaked his feet in henna until they were dyed purple. I can only guess why the Government wanted him with me but we spent every night ...”

“... directions from Thomson’s might ask whether Kidman merits such a tribute – at least for now. Lauren Bacall, her co-star in Lars von Trier’s Dogville (2003), denied that Kidman was a ‘screen legend’: ‘She can’t be a legend, you have to be older.’ Thomson is not dealing in legend, though, but in the power of desire. Kidman isn’t just a ...”

“... by acclimatisation and decompression. ‘The Move-In’, the first chapter of the novel she was working on when she died, takes place entirely on a driveway leading up to a Big House (the ‘approach’, as it was known at Bowen’s Court). It was Bowen herself who pointed out that the characters in her novels ‘are almost perpetually in transit’, even ...”

“... thinking that produce sites of hope … conducive to cruel optimism’ – as discussed in Lauren Berlant’s book of that name, hope that traps you and leaves you stuck. Mushrooms exist, in all their weird and wonderful glory, and humans eat them, study them, draw them, stand on them, make them stand for other things. But they can’t do the work ...”

“... equivalent of pulp fiction, the style of the Biden administration was a blend of high-end Ralph Lauren and Andy Warhol.We can use the past tense because, whatever happens in the election, Bidenism is over. The project anchored on the long-serving senator from Delaware and Obama’s vice president had one term in it. Up until the last moments, his entourage ...”

“... it. Within a year other French couture designers were following suit; and a rash of designers working only in ready-to-wear soon began sky-rocketing to success without doing haute-couture collections at all, although most had been trained in it. The prestigious Chambre Syndicate de la Haute Couture de Paris, which set the high standards and granted the ...”

“... or the latest specimen of amusing or abject trash. Whatever genre he tried, he seemed to be working at a role that had no name: critic, prophet, consoler, moral historian. His first book, omitted from the Library of America edition of his work, was a volume of lyrics, Permit Me Voyage, its title drawn from a line by Hart Crane with a tougher edge than ...”

“... wasn’t fazed: ‘My response was: “Egypt angry! You should hear what my aunt Anna said!”’ Working with the director William Wyler was right up her street; he was ‘totally open to my ideas … He understood the way I worked, and my need to feel free enough to invent something new on the spur of the moment.’ Wyler, another famous perfectionist, said ...”

“... young men in a village in Togo a motorbike – the type they would be able to afford only after working for months on a plantation in Nigeria – if they agreed to remain in their village and help their parents rather than travel to Europe. They all refused. ‘Young Africans,’ Smith writes, ‘leave their village, their town or their continent because ...”

“... N. McLane, Erin Maglaque, Gazelle Mba, Azadeh Moaveni, Toril Moi, Joanne O’Leary, Niela Orr, Lauren Oyler, Susan Pedersen, Jacqueline Rose, Madeleine Schwartz, Arianne Shahvisi, Sophie Smith, Rebecca Solnit, Alice Spawls, Amia Srinivasan, Chaohua Wang, Marina Warner, Bee Wilson, Emily Witt Elif BatumanWhen​ Roe v. Wade was overturned, I was ...”

“... its organisation, so they enlisted the help of Michael Pietsch, who ‘had the enormous honour of working with David as his editor on Infinite Jest, and had seen the worlds he’d conjured out of a tennis academy and a rehab centre’. In other words, a saint of 20 lb bond paper, who must have worked in a state of enthralled and transcendent boredom, of the ...”

“... even more desultory: the sappy Waltz Darling in 1989 (McLaren had fallen in love with the model Lauren Hutton) and Paris (1994), a corny homage to his favourite city, featuring cameos from Catherine Deneuve and Françoise Hardy.Meanwhile, McLaren was active on other fronts. First there was a job and an office on a Hollywood lot courtesy of CBS, where he ...”