“... was that she had hips and breasts. She weighed 100 pounds; Shannon Miller, who won the all-around silver for the US in 1992, weighed 72 pounds. Miller wasn’t one of the Károlyis’ gymnasts, but many coaches in the US and elsewhere shared their assumptions, and agreed that Miller had the right kind of body for gymnastics and Kelly didn’t. In Little Girls ...”

“... to Sparta. Its catalogue of model leaders begins with the Confederate general Robert E. Lee, long idolised by McChrystal as a flawed but brilliant military commander, and moves on through a baffling assortment of characters ranging from Walt Disney and Coco Chanel (‘Founders’) to Martin Luther and Martin Luther King (‘Reformers’) with ...”

“... record as a boxer is now becoming a liability to himself and the promoter, Don King, whose silver hair stands reverently to attention as the dollars file towards him in their solemn millions. The problem is simple: Tyson can no longer command a big gate, since he is likely to put his opponents away within a couple of rounds and send the fans home for ...”

“... the autobiography of the painter and photographer Man Ray, in which a starring part is allotted to Lee Miller, the universal muse of the Surrealists, who herself became a famous practitioner of gourmet cookery. Patience Gray belongs to this nexus of cookery and the arts, although she has an earthy, hands-on approach to the real lives of the predominantly ...”

“... both the batting and bowling at the age of 13 – while at Durban High School the opening pair of Lee Irvine and Barry Richards had century or double-century partnerships every week; it was impossible to bowl to them. When in 1969-70 this lot, plus the young Pollock brothers, Peter and Graeme, slaughtered the Australians by four tests to nil, you felt that it ...”

“... They became draws on the coffee-house and festival circuit, while recordings by John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, who had made their names playing house-rocking, amplified blues in Detroit and Chicago, were repackaged and resold in the 1960s as the ‘Real Folk Blues’.When Columbia Records released King of the Delta Blues ...”

“... Prefaced with a quotation from Paul Tillich and with a high-gloss finish (‘his phallus sheer silver’ etc), Couples lent itself usefully to brow-furrowed editorial ponderings on the sexual revolution and its social tremors, unlike the exploding confetti and frantic wrist action of Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint and Gore Vidal’s Myra ...”

“... island fort, in the estuary below, but the fact it’s not circular, the way it’s set into the lee of the hill, makes me think it must be an old stone cabin, how old I don’t know, but it would have been inhabited by Gaelic speakers who cut hay on the two hidden meadows further up the hill, or grew potatoes or oats on them. It’s a hot, sunny July ...”

“... the Duchy was making tea from the kettle that boiled over a spirit lamp’; she ‘filled the silver teapot and received her daughter’s kiss, emanating a little draught of violets’. The Duchy and Rachel are elevated into a saintly ordinariness. They are a mostly vanished English middle-class type: girlish into old age, unsexual (the Duchy sleeps alone ...”

“... which still dominate the English novel. Heralded by commendatory quotes from Tom McCarthy and Lee Rourke on the cover of this new gathering of previously uncollected or unpublished writings, Ann Quin now seems to be emerging as their best ancestor. She has all the biographical qualifications for the job of precursor, as well as being famously and ...”

“... nauseated as the plane moves through the letters of her name, but manages to help the pilot shoot silver iodide into the clouds. In the last paragraphs of the book, the needed rain begins to fall. The point, it seems to me, is that we must take this late 20th-century vision of a queen of the crop, not only as a combination of the ordinary and the ...”

“... ground for such a history: the future was being broken up and stirred around. The literary critic Lee Edelman has written that children are charged with the continuity of collective narrative, with ‘the task of assuring “that we being dead yet live.”’ Tudor children, thrust into a world of religious turmoil, economic upheaval and political ...”

“... be organised also includes people dressed in simulated buckram and taffeta and the gleaming mock-silver of property breastplates and crowns, all of them borrowed from the second-best wardrobe of the Royal Shakespeare Company in order to deck out students and members of local amateur dramatic societies as representative characters from each of Shakespeare’s ...”

“... are pulverised by the water or the wind. Once, on a flawless sandy beach in Donegal, I found five silver fishes, freshly abandoned by a wave, glittering and bright as knives presented in a canteen. The yacht Annag was riding at anchor in the Sound of Shillay. The Sound separates two of the Monach Isles, Shillay itself and Ceann Iar, and although the Sound was ...”

“... list; items included ‘handkerchiefs, purse (very necessary), an evening dress, an otter muff, silver hairpins, iced-wool fascinator, a tray with set of manicure articles, mink muff and a shell hairpiece’. In her chatty way Peril makes these 19th-century girls sound quite contemporary: ‘Five weeks later, Ruth was at it again; this time she needed ...”