“... his escape into the army, to serve first in Palestine as a peacekeeper, then with his old Lee-Enfield as a sniper in Malaya, from where he returned home – out of the fire, into the frying-pan – and joined the Gardaí. The case he is finally summoned to, by numerous ineluctable internal and external factors, and so much to his surprise that he ...”

“... recompense was vast.I need to declare an interest here: a coming to terms with my own past. As a child of the German Jewish diaspora I lived in some intimacy with the Wiedergutmachung, the German reparations. There was a lot of talk in my family and among our friends about finding documents that would establish eligibility and prove damages; there was a lot ...”

“... According​ to one of her cousins, Mary Flannery O’Connor was ‘a very peculiar child’. When she was six, she drew countless pictures of chickens. To discourage classmates from sharing her lunch, she would sometimes take castor oil sandwiches to school. Her own recollection of herself is characteristically acerbic: ‘a pigeon-toed only child with a receding chin and a you-leave-me-alone-or-I’ll-bite-you complex ...”

“... gained admission to the New School by showing the dean his poetry, befriended Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, supposedly knocked out Anatole Broyard during a bar fight, and became the lover of the avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren, with whom he made The Very Eye of Night (1955). He got his break in ‘pictures’, as he called them, when Preston Sturges asked ...”

“... and his wife Arloie, Reuben Kadish, Roger Wilcox, Rita Benton. They write with respect about Lee Krasner and without parti pris. My impression is that the book is written with justice. Many of their witnesses are still very much alive. The book – which in certain passages could be mistaken for a compendium of old gossip – has aroused controversy of ...”

“... Rye, she would grit her teeth at me and give her confidence to the black cook. I would find my own child become a mad little animal.’ Confidence is again at issue in another story, ‘The Scoutmaster’: ‘she was one of the few young girls who never – Never once! Aunt Grace could vouch for it. She had the girl’s confidence – never stepped outside the ...”

“... in the Sick-Room was written and the ‘youthful vanity’ with which the ailing and ‘pious’ child had anticipated her swift translation to heaven (‘I hoped for, and expected early death till it was too late to die early’), the Autobiography, too, owed its existence to Martineau’s belief that she was about to die. Convinced that she was ‘again ...”

“... The Emerging Voice (1987), James Woodress’s Willa Cather: A Literary Life (1987) and Hermione Lee’s Willa Cather: A Life Saved Up (1989). More recently, Benjamin Taylor published Chasing Bright Medusas (2023), and now Garrett Peck’s The Bright Edges of the World: Willa Cather and Her Archbishop has appeared. Both benefit from the newfound freedom to ...”

“... written and read into existence. Social categories are important in Pamela – the heroine is a child of the worthy but impecunious lower class who has become a servant to the gentry, and when she exchanges the finery of a lady’s maid for the drab of a country girl for a trip home, she appears to those around her ‘a Stranger’, and is to her master a ...”

“... by having the main character in both movies called Brandon. In the Valley of Elah centres on Tommy Lee Jones as a father, himself a Vietnam War veteran, looking for his son, who has gone missing after a tour of duty in Iraq. What he discovers is the pathology of an army lost in the world, unable to explain to itself its rage or its failures. Redacted is even ...”

“... reminded her, she says, of crossing the border after visiting relatives in Northern Ireland as a child. Her mother had risked a contraband packet of tea, which the customs man found at first touch. ‘How well I put my hand on it!’ he said, though he let them keep it: a poor widow and her daughter, who would grow up so honest she was uneasy when I made ...”

“... from a tree near Woolsthorpe to the orbit of the Moon around the Earth. When Mach was still a child, it had been concluded on the strength of Newton’s laws that there must be an as yet unseen planet in the solar system, its presence deduced from subtle wobbles in the orbit of Uranus. In 1846, the discovery of Neptune was celebrated across Europe as one ...”

“... member who could legitimise their forays into Black music, and Innervision came up with Dee C. Lee, later a solo artist and member of the Style Council. Deon Estus, a dreadlocked Detroit-born bassist who had studied with James Jamerson of Motown’s Funk Brothers and had recently toured Europe with Marvin Gaye, also joined the band. (In Gavin’s ...”

“... of the Past’, written in 1939, which evokes in absorbing detail the early life of a child of well-to-do parents, ‘born into a very communicative, literate, letter-writing, visiting, articulate late-19th-century world’. Most of the time, Woolf maintains, we exist enveloped in a kind of ‘nondescript cotton wool’. ‘One walks, eats, sees ...”

“... the son of a diplomat, he grew up bilingually in Washington, and has taught at Harvard. As a child, he has said, Mexico seemed to him a non-existent country, an invention of his father’s imagination. It was not until the age of 16 that he went to live in Mexico City; later he chose to write in Spanish because, he has stated, there was ‘much more ...”