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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Worsthorne, Paul Johnson and Auberon Waugh are, pro tem, in favour of the mosque against secular, brown activists of the Rushdie type? It is depressing to notice how much of the commentary in this matter depends on the unstated false antithesis between ‘the West’ and ‘Islam’. Some parts of the Muslim world, after all, experienced the presentiments of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... has taken the opportunity to talk openly about the worrying thoughts in our heads as we drain the brown fluid from the meat in a polystyrene punnet. Obesity, heart disease, animal welfare, greenhouse gases, the nagging intimation that we can’t go on as we have without parts of the food chain shearing away: Defra grasps that our misgivings, like our ...”

“... not that long ago. The filming marine is breathing heavily. He climbs out of the trench into a brown winter wood where every branch has been snapped and torn by bullets and shrapnel. Later, he will upload this to the internet.There is a terrible, bleak genre of video in which soldiers at the threshold of death film themselves; a kind of farewell message to ...”

“... box. When I get to the village I find that one of these pensioners was our ex-postman Maurice Brown. I ask him whether the Queen spoke to him. ‘No. She only stopped at people who had something wrong with them. I haven’t, so she just gave me the money.’29 March, Yorkshire. Easter Saturday and an appropriately monastic day out, going first via ...”

“... Sean Crampton had lost a leg (his prosthetic replacement, which was always attached to the same brown brogue, was placed behind a curtain at night, with only the foot showing, to deter intruders); Roger Lloyd had lost an arm (I initially thought that his huge dog, Gozo, so fierce that he had to be housed in a derelict tennis court, had torn it from its ...”

“... hallway, waiting for someone … She often wrote with her eyes closed, which Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar use for their argument that she was ‘essentially a trance writer’. The debate about how ‘instinctive’ (therefore less impressive to some) her process was doesn’t seem to me to be the best way of evaluating the books, though it would be ...”