“... take the plebeian slattern or the sexless idealist and intellectual (Jude and Arabella or Sue Bridehead)? Sometimes Hardy, like Austen, surrendered to wish-fulfilment, and united the yeoman and the middle-class woman: both Under the Greenwood Tree (1872) and Far from the Madding Crowd end with the happy exhaustion of marriages. But The Woodlanders ...”

“... is obvious to Sadie that all of them carry this patina of whiteness, or Wasp-ness more so: be they Black, Latin, Asian, they’re Ivy League strivers, they all start their comments with overdrawn ums, and they’ll all end up working in law firms or hospitals or consultancies or banks having majored in art. They are ethnically heterogeneous and culturally ...”

“... and many of its incoming MPs lack parliamentary experience, let alone experience of government. Sue Gray’s appointment as chief of staff signals Starmer’s intent to make the government machine function, but it isn’t clear that he realises how dysfunctional, demoralised and hollowed-out its institutions have become. Gray has a formidable Westminster ...”

“... up against.) Nor is Rosie having much fun in bed. She is distinctly lukewarm about her affair with Sue and is half-heartedly joining threesomes: partly ‘because the men found it fascinating’ and partly because ‘to refuse was as old-fashioned as refusing sex altogether.’ She does not seem to enjoy taking LSD either: it had ‘provided a non-stop joust ...”

“... There were several regulars, of various ethnicities. There was Jovo, a Montenegrin with a huge black moustache. There was Paul, a Serb, who had been a partisan and had a long scar on his cheek. There was a Slovenian hunter who wore a Tyrolean jacket and played the accordion. My mother would rustle up something to eat, and everybody would sit around the ...”

“... stay in the front cabin with the driver and doesn’t have to check passengers’ tickets. But Sue Saunders, who works as a cleaner on the trains, has to walk through the carriages spraying sanitiser and cleaning surfaces. ‘We have visors, masks and gloves,’ she says, ‘but we fear for our safety and several of my friends have caught Covid.’ The ...”

“... brain structures or activities. It has been found that the posterior part of the hippocampus of black-cab drivers is enlarged by comparison with a control group (though one London cabbie told us he didn’t believe a word of it as he’d been a black-cab driver for 30 years, like his father before him, and if it were ...”

“... blacks, about whom she had complicated feelings. When she was very young she had wished she was black, would pray for a transformation each night and in the morning ‘run to the looking-glass … to see if the miracle had happened ’. Later on, she envied them their lives – ‘they had a better time than we did’; and wondered whether, being ...”

“... these records I’ve had in my head for years, just in case Roy Plomley or Michael Parkinson or Sue Lawley or whoever used to do My Top Twelve on Radio One asked me in as a late and admittedly unknown replacement for somebody famous?’ And what was Rob’s killer move when he was in the process of getting to know Laura in the first place? He made her a ...”

“... man of commanding presence, great courage and colossal physical strength: it was said that ‘the Black Devil’ could hold four rifles at the end of his outstretched arm, one finger in each barrel. In Egypt in 1799 he quarrelled with Napoleon, accusing him of putting personal ambition before Revolutionary principles; he was sent home. On the way, his ship ...”

“... young American woman poet, studying on a fellowship at Cambridge, meets and marries the ‘black marauder’ who is the male poet-muse of her fantasies. Doubled and twinned – ‘one skin between us’, as she says; ‘two feet of one body’, as he says – they launch on the hard labour of poetic careers, supporting themselves on writing prizes and ...”

“... fired at Richard Mcllkenny, and he thought he was dead. When he opened his eyes he saw threads of black material coming out of the barrel and floating down to the floor. Again and again the men were told that they would be killed if they did not confess: they had ‘gelly on their hands’ and no one could care less if they were found dead. McIlkenny, Walker ...”

“... in Norwalk, Ohio would probably fail. Suddenly strapped for credit – courtesy of Tappan’s black mark – Beardsley took the Agency to court, where the lascivious details came tumbling out. Mrs Beardsley had indeed moved out of the house, filed for divorce, and accused her husband of adultery with seven women, including a mother-daughter pair. When ...”

“... in a souvenir replica of the Hotel’) for $7.95. Down below, at the time of the author’s visit, black children were being murdered, nobody could say why or by whom. There’s a certain link between money and death, which is what makes Claus von Bülow so famous. There’s a link, also, between money and not dying for as long as possible, like the ...”

“... Fire Station it was taught by, among others, a remarkable woman who I think was the choreographer Sue MacLennan. If Cunningham was about mastering the body’s weight, Release was about giving in to it. There were still strings attached to the room around you, but instead of suspending you along some taut vertical axis and helping you keep centred, these ...”