“... know. Her meagre salary as a New York City schoolteacher ended when she was fired. Mental illness may have been the cause, or maybe not. After that she scratched a living by addressing envelopes at home. In 1948, when Stone was eleven, they moved into a single room in the once comfortable, now decaying Endicott Hotel on New York’s West Side. There was no ...”

“... binary sexuation, the existence and structure of the family itself?Just​ as a sex worker may not be able to help but notice the need to ‘feign nonboredom, manage power-laden transactions, regulate enjoyment’ even when spending supposedly free time with the one she loves, so women who have worked as paid surrogates ...”

“... give feedback to others, we allow ourselves to be steered in directions we did not consent to, and may not wish to go. This has echoes of the mid-20th-century fears of advertising, PR and propaganda, with the difference that now, in the age of reaction chains, we are drawn towards controversy, absurd public spectacles, endlessly mutating memes, trolling ...”

“... my head up high and say that now it is sorted’.The Infected Blood Inquiry, announced by Theresa May in 2017, began proceedings the following year. It has now heard oral evidence from more than two hundred people, with many thousands of pages of documents and written submissions, from family members as well as victims. Gary, Colin, Joe and Bob were all born ...”

“... Armstrong’s pre-cancer physique probably had something to do with steroids, and the steroids may or may not have contributed to his getting cancer: we can’t know. In a conversation with his doctors during his cancer treatment that Armstrong now denies ever took place, but which two friends who were in the room at the ...”

“... Mossocks. Across his career Garner has shown an aversion to setting the scene, but in this case it may be a shrewd move. Young readers can impose their own preference, or let the protagonists be the same age without the technicality of twinhood. It’s revealed late in the book that Colin is the taller by an inch, which could mean anything. There’s the ...”

“... by contrast with Korda’s roman à clef insinuation, and are so distressing that comparison may seem odious. But some of the same questions apply. Suppose Olivier had romped in private with the whole of London Zoo, would this be something we needed to know? We’d love to know, of course. Though we surely accept that the art, the work, the well-spring ...”

“... Attempts at description are stupid,’ George Eliot says, yet one may encounter a fragment of unexhausted time. Who can name its transactions, the sense that fell through us of untouchable wind, unknown effort – one black mane? Anne Carson Funny you should mention a crow. For years light … for years light eluded me or stayed only a short time … something … what was it … heavy in me … a weight I couldn’t put down … How will you let her go, the girl with the high ponytail and all the wishes, the flooded tremendous wishes … ? In the valley there was a crystal shop and, they said, a lot of healers ...”

“... in Victorian times, when children respected their elders and knew their place; that their place may have been halfway up a chimney or down a coalmine is tactfully overlooked. ‘The root cause of anti-social behaviour,’ Field says, ‘stems from the failure of some families to promote a set of common decencies, which centre on a proper consideration of ...”

“... selfishness and violent behaviour at the National” was what convinced Harold to vote Tory in May. I too voted Tory but that was quite unashamedly in order to see a woman walk into No. 10. Neither of us knew much about Mrs Thatcher’s politics.’ She got her wish, Mrs Thatcher did walk through the door of No. 10, but ‘subsequently, Harold, by his own ...”

“... be able to communicate with other humans merely by thinking to each other. Speech, as we know it, may well become obsolete . . . We will not need to remember anything . . . We will even be able to relive memories that we didn’t have in the first place . . . Of course it doesn’t mean everyone has to become a cyborg . . . But be warned . . . those who ...”

“... ravens are omnivorous. Pernicious. Monogamous. I’m interested in monogamous. I got married last May and had my honeymoon in Stykkishólmur. This year I returned to Stykkishólmur to live with my husband for three months in one small room. This extreme monogamy proved almost too much for us. Rather than murder each other we rented a second place (Greta’s ...”

“... be helped with. ‘Character’, on the other hand, is about people helping themselves. Purnell may fade away (we live in hope). The danger is that whoever is leading the Labour Party in five or ten years’ time, or whenever it next wins office, will look, and speak, very much as he ...”

“... was a passion. It was to do with recovering lost worlds from the fragments left to us, and critics may well be right to link this passion to the early deaths of both his parents. It can be life’s greatest blessing to stumble on a vocation whose rhythm fits so nicely with one’s most secret preoccupations. It can also be a curse.Even in Tolkien’s ...”

“... Congress and the executive branch. Whatever an individual lawmaker or policymaker’s own views may be, the Lobby tries to make supporting Israel the ‘smart’ choice. Second, it strives to ensure that public discourse portrays Israel in a positive light, by repeating myths about its founding and by promoting its point of view in policy debates. The goal ...”