“... generating both sophisticated psychoanalytical readings, such as those put forward by Jacqueline Rose in The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (1991), and the schlock movie Sylvia (2003), in which Hughes was played by Daniel Craig and Plath by Gwyneth Paltrow. From the early 1970s more or less until his death Hughes was a major hate figure for those he and his ...”

“... will be familiar to readers of biographies of Rich’s contemporaries – Sylvia Plath, say, or Susan Sontag or Helen Frankenthaler. But the cascade of good fortune that poured down on the ambitious young Adrienne unsettles even her biographer: ‘Had she asked a judge or committee for the moon in those days, who knows but she wouldn’t have come home to ...”

“... which was simultaneously ‘inscribed into the meaning and practice of modern womanhood’. Susan Whyman’s The Pen and the People is a celebration of democratisation, showing how important letter-writing became to middling and even some plebeian English men and women. The key gauge used to measure literacy rates across large social groups is the ...”

“... a stir: Donna Tartt, David Leavitt, Mary Gaitskill, Lorrie Moore, Amy Hempel, Nancy Lemann, Susan Minot, Mary Robison, Anderson Ferrell – a cast of dozens. Many of those rookies trained at the literary dojo of the author, editor, creative writing teacher and guru-mentor-mindgamer Gordon Lish, who bore the dashing nickname ‘Captain Fiction’. The ...”

“... friend sneaked me into the Unprofor headquarters in a villa in the centre of town. General Michael Rose was away in Pale, we were told, negotiating with the Serbs. We were shown into a bedroom, now used as Rose’s private office. A Royal Marine sat back in the general’s chair, feet on the desk, his head hidden behind a ...”

“... wife, Carol, has her bag stolen during a lunch with the extremely dapper Said. Said immediately rose to the occasion. Did he chase down the thieves, or summon the cops? No. He took her shopping. At once, he was at her service, not only suggesting shops in the vicinity where a replacement might be found, but also offering to be her guide and adviser until ...”

“... These are the questions the later part of the novel asks in subtle detail but doesn’t answer. As Susan Stewart says in her introduction, the initial crimes ‘gradually fade in relation to the story of Langlois’s astonishing response to them’. The locals worry about what has happened. ‘Aren’t there courts and an executioner in Paris?’ But they talk ...”

“... with it. The children grew up as one might expect. Gigante reports the first words of ‘Little Rose’: ‘“Hoad yo’ yaw!” she reputedly snapped at the child of the cook. “You’re only a knobby-headed niggah anyway.”’George had told Keats and Tom when he left (and perhaps believed it) that he was seeking a fortune in America for their ...”

“... portrait of a literary figure who remains – despite the highest praise from W.G. Sebald and Susan Sontag, among other admirers – stubbornly elusive. It has not always been easy, for Anglophone readers in particular, to place Walser’s strange productions. Kafka, who admired Walser’s newspaper work, is the inevitable comparison. The Viennese ...”

“... other favourite hobby. Guest lists meant something then. The novelist William Styron and his wife, Rose (respected worldwide as a human rights activist), had drawing power as party hosts, the cultural cachet to net composers, playwrights, directors, ratfink fabulists and a former president’s daughter to toast the holidays and air out their egos. Such dos ...”

“... how remarkable this statement is can be gauged when you compare it with the instruction given by Susan Shabangu, minister of mines at the time of the 2012 Marikana mine massacre, to a meeting of police officers on the subject of how to deal with offenders: ‘You must kill the bastards if they threaten you or your community. You must not worry about the ...”

“... different course. Clark attacks this problem by continuously revolving his narrative like a lazy Susan in a restaurant. After pages about Naples and the Bourbon kingdom come news from Austria at roughly the same point, then Hungary, followed by the situations in Wallachia and Croatia, Bohemia, Prussia, Vienna, Paris … Each will return later in the ...”

“... remember thinking … Why couldn’t I play the part? I felt I could do it just as well as Susan Strasberg.’ Her talent, especially at the beginning, was a product of her ambition rather than the other way around; when she played a Roman slave pining after a centurion, ‘I wasn’t particularly attracted to the actor. So … I put a piece of ...”

“... I count a dozen cases, including that of the three Frenchmen, in this category. Among them are Susan Browne, ‘taken in bed with a Scotsman in a common bawdy house’; Anthony Horne, tailor, ‘locked up in a shed in Chiswell Street with Margery Blague in the night, and apprehended by the constable’; Henry Manne, gentleman, ‘complained to be a very ...”

“... intercourse to days of the month when she was most likely to conceive, she took Vitamin E, drank rose-hip tea, and went to a hypnotist and after that an acupuncturist, all to no avail. Her body maintained the relentless, pulsing, bleeding course it had become so accustomed to. When Tania was thirty-six, and worn out by hope disappointed, she gave up. ‘I ...”