“... alone echoes in the France of the Liberation with an emotional charge equal to that of Verdun.’ Sarah Farmer’s account of Oradour’s destruction is muted: Four days after the Allied landings in Normandy, SS troops encircled the town of Oradour in the rolling farm country of the Limousin and rounded up its inhabitants. In the marketplace they divided the ...”

“... health and fortune that haunts her fiction was the product of experience. Unexplained decline and death is a common plot device. It is easy to smile at the narrative convenience of these obscure illnesses, but Wood’s much-loved grandfather, the foundation of the family’s fortune, died just as many of her characters do – of an illness which ‘baffled ...”

“... But popular piety preserved the romantic lie about the wasting consumptive and her gentle death; the sordid realities of vomiting and bedsores were suppressed, and her convent’s policy of denying Thérèse pain relief was elevated into suffering gladly embraced. Kathryn Harrison’s short life of Thérèse complements Monica Furlong’s 1987 ...”

“... were both applauded and judged harshly when she was alive. Now, forty years after her death, they are the subject of increasing critical interest. In her lifetime she was praised by H.L. Mencken, Sinclair Lewis, Louise Bogan, but Edmund Wilson said that One of Ours,* her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, was a complete failure and that My Antonia ...”

“... don’t like people asking me questions.’ He suspects that what’s troubling her is the recent death of her father, Serk, an academic on sabbatical in Japan. He drowned one evening after he and Louisa took a walk together by the sea. ‘You told people your father was kidnapped,’ Dr Brickner says. ‘I think you meant he’d been taken away from ...”

“... would look dreary and unstylishly old hat. In this book, James Whorton makes it clear that dealing death by poison was not, after all, exclusively suburban, although, apart from later industrial disasters, it does seem to have been almost entirely domesticated. The poison in Whorton’s book is specifically arsenic, and the deaths were only sometimes the ...”

“... on the general question of whether the work as a whole is well executed,’ Strabo writes (in Sarah Pothecary’s translation), ‘so one should exercise similar judgment in the case of this work. It, too, is a colossus [kolossourgia], dealing with mega-issues and general matters.’ He concludes by making an even grander claim for what his work will ...”

“... described the work in his memoir, A Forger’s Life (2009), written with his daughter Sarah: ‘I dreaded the technical error, the small mistake, the tiny detail that could have escaped me. The slightest second of inattention can prove fatal, and on each piece of paper depends the life or death of a human ...”

“... gruesomely named ‘Swann’s Songs’ is discovered years later by a young feminist scholar, Sarah Maloney, and Swann’s reputation begins to grow. Scheming academics, obsessive literary biographers, unreliable or downright devious relatives, neighbours and acquaintances of the dead woman, combine to clarify (or is it obscure?) the circumstances of her ...”

“... earlier part of the narrator’s life.It’s a daunting move, opening a collection with a pet’s death – ‘I’d always known I’d have to live without her someday; I just hadn’t known it would be tomorrow’ – but it only gets grimmer, in a euphoric way, from there. The narrator who presides over most of the book is rueful, plaintive, with a ...”

“... of the Avant-Garde , dealing with the history of the New York art world from 1940 to 1985, Sarah Crane reflects on the differences between success in the literary marketplace and success for the visual artist. Because novels sell at a much lower price than paintings or other artworks, the market for literature is much greater and commercial success ...”

“... It’s one of the few pavilions to have remained unchanged. The only advantage given to it by Sarah Lucas, so insightful in interview, so frustrating in practice, is the marigold yellow interiors (she calls them ‘deep cream’) which set off the pale terracotta façade nicely. Inside the plaster casts of her female friends’ lower halves – some ...”

“... against a vast, inhospitable landscape; one aberrance in the form of a Hollywood thriller starring Sarah Michelle Gellar; and Senna (2010), a documentary about the Formula One driver pieced together from 15,000 hours of archival footage. As Kapadia told the New York Times, there are few people about whom you could make a film like Senna, because he was so ...”

“... feed, wash, soothe and scold an infant, and something like a history of mothering comes into view. Sarah Knott privileges anecdote in her account of mothering in Britain and North America over the past four centuries, partly because she wants to think about subjectivity and experience, but also because anecdote implies interruption, distraction and ...”

“... British stage since the mid-18th century; but despite a lineage that included her aunt, Sarah Siddons, her father, Charles, and her uncle, the great tragedian John Philip Kemble, Fanny herself was deeply ambivalent towards the theatre. She first aspired to be a writer rather than an actress; and it was only when the family faced bankruptcy that the ...”