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“... interruption, distraction and inconsequence. The history of mothering has to be told through small, unfinished stories because hardly anyone before the mid-20th century believed the subject deserved lengthy description. Mothers appeared to stand outside historical time: empires rose and fell while babies napped. Knott addresses her reader ...”

“... Earlier​ this month, a small storm hit social media when it was revealed that a number of cultural studies journals had been the victims of a massive hoax. Three collaborators had submitted twenty ‘bat-shit insane’ papers – as they described them – to places like Gender, Place and Culture and Sex Roles. Four of the papers were published, and another three had been accepted for publication ...”

“... from the house of the aunts who were raising him into the snow and almost froze to death; still a small child, he was hauled up from a ledge by a courageous older companion after he had fallen down a rockface while tending goats. He spent his teens wandering Central Europe with a group of other young vagabonds, looking for an education and surviving by ...”

“... up appearances and deficit in social skills were remedied to some extent by his marriage to Helen Brevoort, the impoverished child of an old Albany family. Though her mother worked hard to contrive the match, Helen had her own reasons for going along with the machinations. She wanted not luxury but the freedom and ...”

“... it involves an element of nightmare. How much better, then, to have reality that is also escape. Helen Simpson is one of those writers who make a virtue of reality by improving on it. Her stories belong to middle-aged or young women, not all of them mothers, who can just remember what it was like to be younger. She is Posy Simmonds without the social ...”

“... and there’s interesting: sometimes you just get lost. The first work I saw by the British artist Helen Marten, about eight years ago, was a sculpture resembling a makeshift desk or lectern, on and around which were strewn various baked goods, a sheet of beaten copper and a pile of pizzeria flyers showing Gerhard Richter’s 1988 painting Betty. The piece was ...”

“... always a step ahead of Ralph. He marries a Chinese friend of hers called Hailan, who becomes Helen. Helen is very young, and was brought up rich and sheltered in China, so she starts several steps behind Ralph (in adaptability, that is), but soon overtakes him. The Revolution cuts them all off from their ...”

“... To read​ a novel by Helen Garner is to intrude on characters living their lives with no regard for your presence. You wander into their stories with the same sense of abandon with which they wander into Melbourne flophouses, drug dens, the homes of old and new lovers. ‘In the old brown house on the corner, a mile from the middle of the city, we ate bacon for breakfast every morning of our lives,’ begins Garner’s first novel, Monkey Grip (1977), whose narrator, Nora, ushers you to the kitchen table then leaves you to pick your way through the raucous crowd gathered there in the summer of 1975 ...”

“... international figures such as Patrick White, Thomas Keneally and now Peter Carey crowds a small army – a second wave, as it were – of grant-garlanded and prize-bedecked novelists and storytellers, many of whom, especially those whose reputations derive initially from short fiction, have benefited from the Board’s largesse. The recent publication ...”

“... off what God might provide in the way of roots, berries and wild herbs, or at most as tending a small garden. The distinction between those who cooked their food and those who ate it raw in the Middle Ages was less likely to mark out the civilised from the savage than the secular from the spiritual. Official withdrawal from the world did not necessarily ...”

“... she had implied.Walking to the centre of Kolonia, Pohnpei’s main town, I passed sleeping dogs, small shops selling snacks, a Unicef office in a shipping container, a post office, a satellite dish as big as the post office, the bright green tourism office with a sign showing the distance from Pohnpei to various cities around the world, and a billboard ...”

“... being young, part of the psychopathology of everyday life, then it stopped. Maybe you stop losing small things around the time you start losing big ones – parents, countries, friends – but I haven’t lost a bank card in ten years and I used to lose ten a year. In my twenties, I was forever dropping keys and leaving coats in cloakrooms, or spectacles on ...”

“... their husbands’ overalls.Sagar’s film, along with new commissioned works by Sonia Boyce, Helen Cammock and Rory Pilgrim, is part of Radio Ballads, a group exhibition which has just come to the end of a run at Serpentine North and Barking Town Hall (in the same square as the new memorial). The Body Blow shares its name with one of the original Radio ...”

“... right after, but she was ugly anyway and it didn’t matter.’ In one splendidly unsavoury scene, Helen Franklin, the novel’s clever, unhappy heroine, sits with three other women discussing their greatest ever sin. One of them admits that as a child she routinely stole money from her mother: ‘Helen does not like this ...”

“... the parenting part is more or less over. Since her first collection was published 16 years ago, Helen Simpson’s stories have charted that succession of stages: sex and pregnancy in Four Bare Legs in a Bed (1990), babies in Dear George (1995), in Hey Yeah Right Get a Life (2000), ‘the squabbly nuclear family unit . . . awful hobbling five-and ...”