“... was less complaisant. During a row with Austin in January 1885, she ripped the wallpaper from the hall at the Evergreens. Ned felt his mother’s pain. ‘Such superhuman efforts to keep up & cheerful, for those around her, mortal eye never witnessed,’ he wrote to his sister, Mattie, who was away at school. ‘I would willingly lay down my life for ...”

“... newspapers; dusty books and papers, with Chinese characters on the back, in the glass case in the hall; a celadon lamp, yellow rug, small dark teapot; blue saddle-cloths my mother used to veil her television set; framed paintings of black-hatted sages, silk scrolls of ladies under parasols, a horse rolling on its back by a stream. As a resolutely philistine ...”

“... the absence of climate sceptics in high places; and the Cambridge associate professor of divinity James Orr, who has hosted both Jordan Peterson and the notorious peddler of race science Charles Murray at events for Trinity Forum Europe, a conservative Christian charity.These men, together with other right-wing academics, reportedly began meeting in Cambridge ...”

“... the only person mostly missing from the intimate cavalcade of biddable and beddable is Radclyffe Hall, author of the notorious lesbian tear-jerker The Well of Loneliness (1928). But even she makes oblique appearances. De Acosta was wont to describe Garland’s stone-butch girlfriend of the 1920s, the hatchet-faced Dorothy (‘Dody’) Todd, pioneering editor ...”

“... 17 and in my first week at University College Dublin. He shared a platform with the American poet James Tate. While Tate read from his work, Stuart spoke about his difficulty in publishing his novel Black List, Section H, which had finally come out from an American university press. He did not look like a 70-year-old man. He was tall, his frame was thin but ...”