“... novel (no mean feat unless your name is José Saramago), and I gave up before the hundred-page mark. Valérie Tong Cuong’s Voltiges, also published this year, is much more resourceful.2 This is a family saga of sorts, unfolding at a leisurely pace and with a rich psychology, but stripped of any reference to period, so that it could almost be taking place ...”

“... On 12 February this year – a month before her own murder – Mrs Nelson addressed a meeting to mark the tenth anniversary of the murder of Pat Finucane. The Irish Times published a petition signed by 1200 lawyers worldwide calling for a special independent inquiry into allegations of security forces and Loyalist collaboration in the killing of Mr ...”

“... novelist, and wickedest of wits Mary McCarthy, who told Susan she smiled too much, the telltale mark of a provincial. McCarthy was also reputed to have said to Sontag, ‘I hear you’re the new me,’ and, to others, ‘She’s the imitation me,’ digs that made their way round the cocktail circuit and into print. The soundbites had plausibility because ...”

“... or new sexual contacts, the body just doesn’t want to know any more, and nature proceeds to peel you open. The truth, when we find it, may turn out to be less ‘moral’, less totalitarian. Meanwhile, however, that is what it looks like. Judging by the faces and voices of the victims, that is what it feels like too. Aids starts in the 1970s. Here’s ...”

“... mostly self-administered. Born in Manhattan into a wealthy Irish-American business family (the Mark Cross leather goods fortune), Murphy has remained out of focus in part because she was, and continues to be, overshadowed by her splashy older brother, the sleek, sociable (and seriously good) modernist painter of the 1920s, Gerald Murphy, patron of Picasso ...”

“... in favour of refurbishment. It had originally planned to replace 528 flats with only 120 homes.Mark Slater, a tenant activist who lives on a high floor of one of the Seven Sisters, showed me round his flat. He’s a 72-year-old single man and doesn’t live in luxury, but he has a home. The windows look out on the town below and the moors, Saddleworth and ...”

“... describe their everyday and imaginative lives. Their accounts of being told to ‘pilloputate’ (peel a potato) by Tabby, the Brontës’ longstanding servant, of not having made their beds or practised their scales, their hopes for the future, move seamlessly into descriptions of their writing projects (‘Emily is writing the Emperor Julius’ Life’) and ...”