“... meant of course, that he was.’ And: ‘He wanted, but he did not know he wanted, to be like Ann, to stay in a world, in a time, where every day was an age, and every day resembled the one before.’ Both sentences appear in The Children’s Book. The first is from a fairy tale, inserted into the text, and supposedly written by Olive Wellwood. The second ...”

“... of woman by men … Defoe-Flanders, Flaubert-Bovary, Tolstoy-Karenina, La Dernière Mode, Rose Sélavy and beyond’ – while, with the other, tapping out communiqués from a wholly credible author-figure. Ferrante’s written statements and interviews, many of them available in English in Fragments (2013), indicate that she grew up in postwar ...”

“... community of scientists’. The scholarly information problem of ‘too much to know’ – in Ann Blair’s phrase – now appeared as ‘too many languages to know it in’. The problem grew worse with the resurgent Central and Eastern European nationalism that followed the First World War and with the modernisation of Meiji Japan. Language is not ...”

“... Salvador Dalí and Frank Zappa: ‘Dalí took one look at Frank from across the room and rose to his feet in immediate approbation.’ In New York, she wrote, ‘there are no spaces between the words, it’s one of the charms of the place. Certain things don’t have to be thought about carefully because you’re always being pushed from ...”

“... the director to make a public statement denying it. In 1970, the representation of women artists rose from the usual 5 or 10 per cent to 22 per cent. Lippard was involved in another protest that year, against the Metropolitan Museum of Art, when the group released cockroaches at a trustees’ dinner in protest over the museum’s recent exhibition Harlem on ...”

“... authority of this tremendous personage. ‘Last night I would have put my head in the gas oven,’ Ann Fleming wrote, ‘if I wasn’t too frightened of the cook to go into the kitchen.’Landemare​ was the crème de la crème. She could afford to work as an ‘occasion’ cook for grand dinners and parties. Her clientele were often politicians. The exercise ...”

“... of the two Norman families that made spectacularly good in this age of opportunities. The other rose from obscurity to rule Sicily, the richest and best organised kingdom in the Latin world. William’s family had been dukes for five generations by the time he was born; there were a series of similar families in different parts of the one-time Carolingian ...”

“... Adler made similar claims to authenticity. Danto’s achievement is to look at Freud through the rose-tinted spectacles of those early followers, who refracted Freud through Marx, interpreting him as a political optimist rather than the familiar prophet of doom. These pioneers were subject to much ridicule from both the Communist and the psychoanalytic ...”

“... and sunlight. And all the way home in the road she sang: ‘The Cliffs of Moveen’, ‘The Rose of Tralee’, ‘The Boys of Kilmichael’, ‘Amazing Grace’. ‘Nora,’ I said to her between verses, ‘no one would know you are dying to hear you singing now.’ ‘Whatever happens,’ she said, ‘I’m going home.’ She was dead before ...”

“... is a price you must pay for some victory over and above Pearse And Connolly and the ‘right rose tree’. It is, as he said, also ‘liable to bias’. The Queen at the wall in Ireland was not entirely unlike Willy Brandt at the Ghetto memorial. Whether ‘the ultimate reality must be anarchy’ who can presume to say? ‘Tradition is ...”

“... he had a glimpse of one warm cosy corner of the room, its damask furnishings bathed in a tender rose-pink light: the cards lay waiting on the whist table; on the sofa embroidered in subtle silks, a languid, thoughtful Dom Diogo was gazing into the fire and stroking his moustaches the afternoon was drawing to a close, in an Elysian peace, without a breath ...”

“... seems to have any interests – not literature or art or politics or themselves. They are, as Rose Macaulay astutely noted, ‘amiable nitwits’, and some of them aren’t that amiable. You can see the force in Bradbury’s remark that Waugh’s novels of this period are in a way ‘anti-novels’, their mode defined by a deliberate refusal to undertake ...”

“... the repertoire of names in regular use began to increase rapidly. As Gothic-looking steeples rose around the country, so medieval-sounding names crowded around the font: Arthur, Walter, Harold and Neville, Ethel, Edith and Dorothy, soon to be supplemented by endless Geoffreys. This remarkable efflorescence has been described as a ‘personalisation’ of ...”

“... in Molloy’s novel forgetting about the dialect is part of our growing intimacy with the heroine, Ann, who is a sort of feminist Huck or Holden Caulfield abroad among the absurdities and hypocrisies of her elders and betters. One of these is the seemingly kind priest who employs her as a housekeeper: ‘He brought me roun’ the house then te show me me ...”

“... get away. Don’t try to get involved too closely. Otherwise you’ll get your fingers burnt.’ Ann Wood recalls: ‘you really needed just a little bit to be apart, or you really did risk annihilation.’ Rosemond Strode, Britten’s last amanuensis, speaks of Aldeburgh as a ‘flypaper’. The mental cruelties that Britten inflicted on people cannot be ...”