“... an element of uplift without bad faith is George Miller’s 1992 film Lorenzo’s Oil, starring Susan Sarandon and Nick Nolte as the parents of a stricken five-year-old – this time the acronym is ALD, and stands for adrenoleukodystrophy. Miller’s reputation is largely for inventive action films (Mad Max and its sequels), but he trained as a doctor and ...”

“... of the essay with which Hannah Arendt introduced her selection of his work in Illuminations, and Susan Sontag’s ‘Under the Sign of Saturn’ (1978). I would have liked to have gone to Columbia, to study comparative literature with Edward Said, but I had no way to make that happen. So I signed on, read books, went home to help my disconsolate mother, then ...”

“... of embryos frozen in happier days. Monster-mother stories are equally popular: South Carolina’s Susan Smith, who narrowly escaped the death penalty last year after drowning her two small sons and claiming they’d been kidnapped by a black man; New York’s Awilda Lopez, whose alleged torture and murder of her six-year-old daughter Elisa Izquierdo became a ...”

“... Afew years ago​ Susan Neiman published an article titled ‘History and Guilt’, which asked whether America can ‘face up to the terrible reality of slavery in the way that Germany has faced up to the Holocaust’. Her new book tries to answer that question, considering the ways in which the US can learn from Germany’s Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit, its ‘working through the past ...”

“... was said to be very popular, along with ‘Mean Tweets 2024’.‘It’s got this beautiful soft brown cover on it,’ a woman said of the Trump-endorsed Bible she got for $75 plus tax. ‘I love it,’ she added. ‘It shows how much our future president is leaning into his faith.’I spotted a man who was selling The Collected Poems of Donald ...”

“... the marginal social acceptability of Mrs Tiggy-Winkle, whose hand, ‘holding the teacup, was very brown, and very, very wrinkly with the soap-suds; and all through her gown and her cap there were hairpins sticking wrong end out; so that Lucie didn’t like to sit too near her.’ Both these essays show off Davenport’s range and gusto, his feats of ...”

“... to the official view, independent thought was the pathetic pastime of a few outliers like Susan Sontag, who had the temerity to ask: ‘Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a “cowardly” attack on “civilisation” or “liberty” or “humanity” or “the free world” but an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed ...”

“... Colin Kidd, Ross McKibbin, Philippe Marlière, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Jan-Werner Müller, Susan Pedersen, J.G.A. Pocock, Nick Richardson, Nicholas Spice, Wolfgang Streeck, Daniel TrillingDavid RuncimanSo who​ is to blame? Please don’t say the voters: 17,410,742 is an awful lot of people to be wrong on a question of this magnitude. They are not ...”

“... by Naomi Klein’s blurb – ‘inspiring’ – and a frisson added by the book’s appearance: a brown paper wrapping like those used to discourage porn thieves and customs inspectors. Trembling fingers that go further are reminded that this book succeeds Empire (2000), by the same authors, which provided a picture of the global imperium supposed to have ...”

“... becomes a series of rescue missions, staged opportunities for heroism worthy of Hollywood: mobs of brown-skinned extras look up to see helicopters – we are saved! The Americans have arrived! Such are the dreams that hover unarticulated in our political unconscious, allowing our leaders to redefine war as humanitarian intervention. The triumph of fantasy ...”

“... seduced Emily Dickinson’s brother, Austin, 27 years her senior, and destroyed his marriage to Susan Gilbert, Emily’s closest confidante. Like any good seductress, Todd was an opportunist. She exploited Austin’s role as the treasurer of Amherst College to wangle her own husband, David, into powerful university positions and forced him to build her a ...”

“... necessary quandary about it. He cites one critic who asks how Hawthorne got into the canon while Susan Warner, author of Wide, Wide World didn’t make it – a fair enough question – and who attributes his elevation to the interventions of a cluster of male supporters. These include his old college buddies Longfellow and Franklin Pierce, who became the ...”

“... at the Dakota building in Manhattan when he was young – one of them was Jean Stein’s sister, Susan, and the other was a Southern actress named Ruth Ford. Ford played Carlotta in the screen version of Didion’s Play It as It Lays and called the police the night John Lennon was shot outside her building. As related in The Friday Afternoon ...”

“... not feel it yet. Might not know it yet, except you did. ‘A new class of lifetime pariahs’, Susan Sontag called them in Aids and Its Metaphors: ‘the future ill’. The artist and film-maker Derek Jarman remembered his HIV diagnosis, in 1986: I thought: this is not true, then I realised the enormity. I had been pushed into yet another corner, this time ...”

“... by other passionate bonds: somewhere on the scene was always an Ellen, Annie, Charlotte, Ethel, Susan, Lucy. Most of these friendships began with what Minnie called the ‘My God, what a woman!’ stage, progressing from awe-struck enthusiasm to endless letter-writing, pet-names and hand-kissing. It’s doubtful they went much further, though it is clear ...”