“... judged a failure of the times. She was written off as a hysteric but argued that the main problem lay ‘in my ability to assume the receptive attitude, that cardinal virtue in women’. ‘Her illness was a form of self-assertion,’ Strouse adds, and it was soon decided that she should go to Bournemouth, where they knew how to take such things ...”

“... shoulder and heel injuries dropping a bed on his foot while trying to evict from it a drunk Paul Gascoigne, England’s most important player. At Spain 1982 the Argentine manager César Menotti spent most of his time with a German model and missed morning training sessions, so the team exhausted itself in the heat of the afternoons; the full-back ...”

“... no idea what their procedures were. That is perhaps the only excuse for Henry James, who wrote to Paul Bourget that Wilde’s sentence to hard labour was too severe, that isolation would have been more just.’ Close to Wilde’s release date, the governor of Reading Gaol said to Ross: ‘He looks well. But like all men unused to manual labour who receive a ...”

“... the words “beyond reasonable doubt” enough.’ Sarah opened a box of Ferrero Rocher and we lay on the bed discussing it all. I repeated the phrase I’d used weeks before when I talked to Jamie Byng. ‘I want to give you a crash course in self-deprecation.’ He said he had been far more self-deprecating before the custody battle for his son, which ...”

“... major song and Etta one of the supreme live performers. Once, at a surreal outdoor concert at the Paul Masson Winery, marooned among pre-tech-stock-crash Silicon Valley yuppies dutifully sipping Chardonnay, I watched her do the plumpest, most lascivious cakewalk imaginable. But I could hardly live on her for the rest of the day. I started squawking like an ...”