“... message on my Facebook Wall. Self-destructive thoughts when forced to admit they can’t. Like Susan Boyle, all one wants is to have one’s little life back. B., thank god, seems fine. Calls frequently from Cambridge on the Crackberry; thinks I’m making an insane fuss about moving five houses up the street. Full of kind spousal forbearance when I tell ...”

“... of the poet’s lost love: Miss Stacpoole. Yeats told John Quinn, in a letter quoted by Terence Brown in his foreword to the Selected Poems, that Mangan differed from the impersonal ballad writers of his time only ‘in being miserable’. Mangan’s relation to cultural nationalism is no longer as clear as it seemed in Newry. Joyce thought he was ‘little ...”

“... head; Pamela was ‘Woman’, or ‘Woo’, because of her love of domesticity; Jessica was ‘Susan’ as well as ‘Decca’; Unity was ‘Bobo’ or, later, ‘Heart of Stone’. Nancy once wrote to Unity in Berlin to tell her that she’d done some research into their family history and had discovered a great-grandmother Fish, which made them ...”

“... in a ‘Cossack minidress’, she tried to bamboozle her way into Partisan Review by imitating Susan Sontag); and, eventually, in the feminist academy (where her Princeton colleague Ann Douglas – ‘a rebel, a genius, a flash of light’ in a ‘green Diane Von Furstenberg wrap-dress’ – became an idol). Heroine-worship, in other words, is a real ...”

“... I’d like writing something other than legal memoranda. From having read Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s monumental The Madwoman in the Attic, I felt sufficiently ‘imbued with otherness’ to imagine myself doing for sexuality studies what these collaborators – and talk about walking together! – had done for feminism. Only instead of treating ...”

“... developed elaborate games that consumed their attention for weeks on end. Or non-elaborate ones: Susan Baldwin and her friends ‘used to spend hours playing a really simple game … putting a lolly stick on the ground and lying down on the roundabout and going round and round really fast and you had to pick it up’. Some of them knocked on doors and asked ...”

“... prejudice. ‘Hath not a Jew eyes?’ takes on an added power when the eyes are Pacino’s giant brown hooded eyes, so intensely expressive at times and so terrifyingly deadened at others. When the film came out, Frank Kermode wrote in the LRB (6 January 2005) that ‘to give Pacino his due, he plays [Shylock] as a human being, increasingly vicious as his ...”

“... more generally unrepresentable. Attridge’s chapter ‘Against Allegory’ – an allusion to Susan Sontag’s ‘Against Interpretation’ (1964) – suggests that responses such as Gordimer’s to Coetzee’s fiction reflect long-standing cultural anxieties about how to read Modernist texts. It is ‘hardly surprising’, as Attridge acknowledges, that ...”

“... of compassion, comprehension and success. ‘Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship,’ Susan Sontag wrote, ‘in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.’ John Donne believed that illness is the kingdom, that it steals in and corrupts our lives: ‘The disease hath established a Kingdome, an Empire in mee, and will have certaine ...”

“... generation. Crosland’s life now settled down. He met and later married an American journalist, Susan Barnes, and was selected at Grimsby, a seat he held from 1959 until his death. Thus based, he was well equipped to become a shaper of the nation’s future, which was what he had always intended. Somehow it did not happen. In conventional ...”

“... him to the European avant-garde – Webern, Boulez and Stockhausen – to which his contemporaries Susan Bradshaw and Richard Rodney Bennett were also drawn. The mecca for music students in those days was Stockhausen’s headquarters at Darmstadt, where the ‘Darmstadt Headbangers’, as Tom Lubbock describes them, treated Britten and Shostakovich with ...”

“... are utterly inadequate.There’s a YouTube video shot by an oil-rig diver in which huge brown globs of oil float underwater like colossal clots of phlegm. From the surface the chunky brown stuff looks like vomit. ‘Just globs of death out there,’ one diver, Al Walker, says in a Southern accent. ‘Oil so thick ...”

“... and Mary attempts to console herself by shoplifting the tiniest, most inexpensive items. Susan, their efficient eldest daughter, is Constantine’s too-valued favourite; she escapes from his ‘kisses and hugs’ by marrying an ambitious if stolid Republican and achieving a success that is so distillated it’s almost dry. Will, the middle child, is ...”

“... an element of uplift without bad faith is George Miller’s 1992 film Lorenzo’s Oil, starring Susan Sarandon and Nick Nolte as the parents of a stricken five-year-old – this time the acronym is ALD, and stands for adrenoleukodystrophy. Miller’s reputation is largely for inventive action films (Mad Max and its sequels), but he trained as a doctor and ...”

“... of the essay with which Hannah Arendt introduced her selection of his work in Illuminations, and Susan Sontag’s ‘Under the Sign of Saturn’ (1978). I would have liked to have gone to Columbia, to study comparative literature with Edward Said, but I had no way to make that happen. So I signed on, read books, went home to help my disconsolate mother, then ...”