“... works of one canonical name to another, though the second and third categories are slightly too close for comfort, as are the last two. In any case, while families are certainly central to some types of tragedy, they are rather less conspicuous in 20th-century theatre, and there are other subjects which are at least as important – martyrdom, for ...”

“... wrong thing to say.’Compared to its predecessors, Lean Fall Stand – written in a conventional close third person – is technically unassuming. There are points when the subject matter calls for something more inventive, however, as in the series of diminishing paragraphs that depict Doc’s stroke: the first runs for six and a half pages, the last ...”

“... He was an eyewitness to many of the key events in the country’s post-1945 history and was on close terms with senior members of Hanoi’s ruling elite. In September 1990, disillusioned by the corruption and incompetence of the government, he went into exile in Paris. His memoir, Following Ho Chi Minh (1994), as well as a series of interviews he gave to ...”

“... sexual wishes in his patients’ dreams and was given his marching orders), Eugen Bleuler, (Miss) Frank Miller (altruistically given to analysing her own poems), Otto Weininger (a suicide), Johann Jakob Honegger Jr (a suicide), Krafft-Ebing, Goethe, Nietzsche, Leopold Löwenfeld, Wilhelm Stekel, James Jackson Putnam, Karl Abraham, Otto Rank, Otto Gross ...”

“... Sandy Wilson, the designer of the British Library, who met him soon afterwards and became a close friend, had ‘never met anyone who was so deeply convinced of his own significance’. Despite the dead-end jobs and unsuccessful competition entries, Stirling embarked on adult life in the voracious fashion in which he would continue to live: food, drink ...”

“... Roman Empire’ – on which she based her decision to make her home in ‘old Europe’. As Frank Rich put it, she ‘made a life’s work of her ostracisation from the American mainstream and her own subsequent self-reinvention’. Wilson’s book provides a lot of material for what Freud called ‘wild analysis’. We learn, for example, that five ...”

“... that brings tourists to Normandy. She split shifts and worked nights, earning at a rate perilously close to the minimum wage, at that time €8.71 an hour (it went up to €9 in January). The Night Cleaner records her time among those for whom the job of supermarket cashier is ‘prestigious’ and a refuse collector is ‘well paid’. When she arrived in ...”

“... It sounds a bit too much like a fairy tale, just the area Rowling is leaving behind with her frank descriptions of drug-taking and grotty sex. Perhaps that’s why she adds in a fourth use of the cyber-curse, to break the pattern, though this last one is slightly different and the rule-of-three seems to persist. A character who pops up for just long ...”

“... is present so that they can determine the pecking order of flattery.Patterson can be disarmingly frank. Earlier this year, she offered a mid-term assessment to a visiting Euro-intelligence chief. While Musharraf had been unreliable, saying one thing in Washington and doing its opposite back home, Zardari was perfect: ‘He does everything we ask.’ What is ...”

“... me in the eye. ‘Do you believe in God?’ He asks. His cold eyes bore into me, demanding a frank answer … ‘I’ll believe in what you want me to believe in.’ The novel’s short middle section is an extended fugue, separating the hectic events of Rasa’s day from the dreaded wedding that evening. Here there are more expansive flashbacks to ...”

“... you imagined I might be some day). This thought was very disagreeable to me.Wittgenstein to Frank Ramsey:A thing which is of much greater importance to me & was so on Saturday evening, is, that I still can’t understand how, being my supervisor & even – as I thought – to some extent my friend, having been very good to me you couldn’t care two ...”

“... couch. To me, this made her an aristocrat.’ Obviously it couldn’t last. The couple’s friend Frank Bidart told Schoenberger that he was ‘afraid of how destructive [Blackwood] could be when she drank … She once threatened to put her children in the car and smash into a wall.’‘It’s hard not to read The Stepdaughter as a veiled account of ...”

“... Henry Mackenzie and Walter Scott had been before him. There Karl became favourite pupil and close friend of Hector MacIver, that incomparable teacher of literature, who recognised his gifts and took him with his other clever boys down the Calton Hill to Rose Street. In those days, a sort of café society still flourished in Edinburgh. You knew which set ...”

“... younger brothers – Henry, said to have been her favourite, who lived in London, and the sailor Frank, who reported to her from various war fronts … The sisters made good aunts and friends to the next generation.’ Austen cared for some of her nieces and nephews after their mothers died, and seems to have been remembered fondly by all of them. When one ...”

“... Marilyn Monroe fucked both Kennedy brothers before taking her own life, if she did indeed take it. Frank Sinatra raised money for the Reagans and acted as at least a confidante to the First Lady. Norman Podhoretz’s son-in-law Elliott Abrams, while working as Reagan’s Assistant Secretary of State, dunned the Sultan of Brunei for a $10 million backhander to ...”