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“... for much of the USSR’s history. But we should bear in mind, to paraphrase the anthropologist Ruth Benedict, that the last thing a talking fish would be likely to mention is the water in which it swims. A particularly striking example of Bergman’s tendency to discount the Soviet context appears in his otherwise insightful analysis of Sakharov’s ...”

“... like flying in general. ‘I went to Mexico once and was sick for 18 years. Isn’t that right, Ruth?’ ‘That’s right, Bruno,’ old Ruth would chime in from the corner stool. I have always regarded it as one of the singular pieces of good fortune in my life that Bruno didn’t throw me out when I first wandered into ...”

“... that, despite several affairs with women, and a long unrequited passion for the film actress Ruth Ford, he was mostly gay, at any rate towards the end of his life. Even so, he tended to hop in and out of the closet and to protest rather too much that, because of his mother’s hysteria on the subject, he had remained an innocent and a prig for far too ...”

“... reproaches is embarrassing. She is a wonderfully clear-sighted writer, innately courteous, like Ruth Prawer Jhabvala or E.M. Forster, to the creatures of her imagination. It is foolhardy of her, though, to take on Kafka, whose work remains a set text for any examination on the 20th century. Both Robert Plunket and Dirk Bogarde tell tall tales from Los ...”

“... quite. Half-way through the service, a familiar round figure passed us going down the main aisle. Ruth Druss whispered in my ear, ‘It’s Mrs Hahn’ – Mrs Hahn of the lovely turkey sandwiches, the round beaming face, the round body. I remembered Mr Hahn, equally round. Their two faces like lovely moons smiled at our antics from behind ...”

“... history bristles. A ballgown slides off Lou’s shoulder and she looks at herself in the pier glass, admiring, allowing a perfect stranger to admire her too. Once you find one of these scenes you go looking for the others, certain that you’ve stumbled on something. This is what leads us on, those horny lunatics in libraries, this is the Randy ...”

“... Many Christian authorities enjoined widows not to marry again, ignoring the biblical story of Ruth, the young widow who found happiness in a second marriage, and whose son was among the ancestors of David and Jesus. St Jerome lambasted the young widow Furia, seemingly apoplectic at the thought she might remarry: she had, after all, already encountered ...”

“... deny his character anything. Rabbit flees from the stony immovability of Janice and takes up with Ruth Leonard, a former prostitute, and I believe that Updike’s reputation as a sex writer rests on a paragraph that comes during their first sexual encounter: When she has peeled off the stockings and tucked them, tidily rolled, into the crevice by the ...”

“... never was. Now what? ‘I love you for listening,’ Plath, abandoned and alone, tells her analyst Ruth Beuscher in a letter late in 1962. The rest of us are listening at last.The first letter is to Plath’s father, Otto. ‘I am coming home soon,’ she told him on a visit to her maternal grandparents in February 1940 – she was seven. ‘Are you as glad as ...”

“... Poet smells of cashew nuts and cologne. She drinks tea from a plastic cup of cheap rose-coloured glass and says, “This is the age of the migrant and the missile, Lapinski. In some ways you could say our time has come”’ – this is from Beautiful Mutants. ‘Mom is like the phantom limb of an amputee. It tingles in the stump where she once was. Pain is ...”

“... The meal is over. On the tablecloth there are corks, an orange, a few walnut shells, an empty glass and a coffee spoon. Those of us whose instinct is to see if we can somehow balance these objects, one on the other, are generally found to be annoying. Conversation falters. People wait for over ambitious configurations to collapse ...”

“... climate of paragraph one, we arrive at paragraph two which begins: ‘ “Life is hell,” Ruth Cook wrote on the lid of a desk, hoping that someone would see it and that there would be a row.’ And with that, of course, we are off and running. If I may venture another ‘of course’, there is nothing worse in life than a book review which tells the ...”

“... Hall of the Pacific Peoples in New York, where her red cape and walking stick are preserved in a glass case, across from the display of dog and horse gear used by the Blackfoot Indians. Since her death in 1978, Mead’s reputation has foundered. In the 1980s, Derek Freeman, a right-wing Australian anthropologist, set off a brief frenzy in the culture wars ...”

“... a gunpowder demonstration in which he mixed ground saltpeter, ground charcoal and ground glass. Chester was supposed to lend his brother a hand, but Estelle forbade it as punishment for bad behaviour. Joseph Jr miscalculated the ingredients, and the contents of the mortar exploded in his face. Refused treatment at the local hospital because he was ...”

“... 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 Catholics, they also had ‘a better chance in eternity’. Above all, she envied them because they ...”