“... the chance to speak in an unmediated first person fulfilled a more urgent necessity. It allowed Michael Herr, on assignment in Vietnam for Esquire and Rolling Stone, to write about his own terror and confusion as he drifted through the war zone, and it allowed Joan Didion, in The White Album, to weave details of her anxious upscale-Californian life into a ...”

“... Then there were the monumental bronzes: the Madonna and Child in Cavendish Square and the St Michael at Coventry, for example. These were well-liked by most people and liked very much indeed by many. Because they are whole figures, not just heads, you can see how Epstein handled poses: they tend to be solemn, formal and frontal, the palms of the hands ...”

“... however, that we are ‘now moving back to the middle’. He means that we are moving way from Michael Portillo’s pompously ignorant remarks a few days ago when he gave his Israeli hosts carte blanche to do what they liked in Lebanon. I ask with a touch of acrimony why we ever left ‘the middle’ and ring off. On the plane, I read Auden and ...”

“... Web’, which claims that language waters down the child’s vivid apprehension of roses, the ‘black wastes of evening sky’ and the drumming of soldiers. But if we try to get back behind it, Facing the wide glare of the children’s day, Facing the rose, the dark sky and the drums, We shall go mad no doubt and die that way.The repetition makes the ...”

“... two, he is being consciously naive. He knows perfectly well he will be judged principally against Michael Holroyd, whose multi-volume Shaw is one of the longest, most detailed, comprehensive and highly praised biographies of the 20th century. Gibbs’s major charge against Holroyd is that he allowed himself to be taken in by Shaw’s description of a ...”

“... at war. This was felt at every level, from the murder of two first cousins and the memory of the Black and Tans hammering on the door to the misery of living in grey corporation housing during Jim’s internment. Their uncles, cousins, brothers and sisters were IRA activists, many of them high up in the organisation; Eileen’s brother Jack Lynch was the ...”

“... a long lyric mist’. And a woman serving a long prison sentence prays: She looked deep into the black of her closed eyes. Stared into the dark. When your sense of vision has very little stimulation, it invents images. Sarah doesn’t know that the name for this is Prisoner’s Cinema. It is a trick of the mind, blindness turned into glorious ...”

“... another factor, which Mortimer is the first biographer to be able to take into account. In 1998, Michael Bennett revealed that a badly burned charter in the Cottonian Collection, just readable under ultraviolet light, was a copy of a previously unknown declaration by Edward III of October 1376, strictly limiting the royal succession to his male heirs and ...”

“... died, and a fifth is missing. At the start, her daughter has received what may well be the missing Michael’s clothes, washed up from the sea ‘in the far north’ at Donegal. During the course of the play, Maurya tries to persuade her remaining son, Bartley, not to ride off with the horses to the Galway fair, predicting that he, too, will be taken by the ...”

“... of a family name such as Bellegueule is a challenge to even the most skilful translator. Michael Lucey opts for ‘Prettymug’, which is as close as English gets: a man with ‘une belle gueule’ tends to be rugged and macho, while one with ‘un beau visage’ is handsome in a more standard fashion. When combined with Eddy (very much not ...”

“... to keep a tight rein on her three daughters. Adaline’s moral code was worked out in what Michael Holroyd in his introduction memorably terms the ‘moral gymnasium’ of the last Victorian decades. He characterises it, too harshly, as a culture of ‘conceit and condemnation … complacency and fear of change’, but it was a period when conventions ...”

“... into a revolt. Still, when Republicans were roaming through Cork and Tipperary shooting at the Black and Tans, it was possible to feel heroic. But it must have been hard to feel heroic in the Civil War and the years that followed its crimes. Yet O’Faolain’s early stories want you to feel that life in Ireland was a romance, and sometimes an epic. I have ...”

“... Vanity Fair in full make-up and a bulging décolletage, her arms around the bare biceps of the two black bodyguards she calls ‘my centurions’. In the introduction to Sex, Art and American Culture, a bizarre grab-bag of book reviews, interviews, transcribed lectures, classroom notes and personal memorabilia, Paglia gleefully provides an annotated ...”

“... of Stan without his knowledge. At first, the hints of menace, guilt and racial tension – Gary is Black, Stan is not, and the episode is told from Stan’s point of view – seem to enter the territory of Michael Haneke’s Caché, but Ridgway’s story is subtler, less gothic. Stan always knows who’s sending the ...”

“... Touching Feeling, the queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick describes its strange and haunting black and white cover photograph as ‘the catalyst that impelled me to assemble the book in its present form’. It depicts a woman clumsily embracing an object that resembles an enormous wasps’ nest made of sticks and twine. The woman’s eyes are shut, and ...”