“... Sophie Smith, Rebecca Solnit, Alice Spawls, Amia Srinivasan, Chaohua Wang, Marina Warner, Bee Wilson, Emily Witt Elif BatumanWhen​ Roe v. Wade was overturned, I was finishing the tour for my new novel, Either/Or. It’s a sequel to my first novel, The Idiot. Both books are set during my own college years, in the ...”

“... Castle had had a similar problem in the late 1940s when she went to Canada with her boss, Harold Wilson, when he was president of the Board of Trade. ‘Wives are never invited’ to official dinners, she was told. ‘“I am not Harold’s wife,” I retorted hotly. “I am not even his mistress. I am his PPS.”’ It’s interesting to see just how much ...”

“... and which has promoted the Cotswolds as England’s imaginary heart, has perhaps less taste than Emily Brontë for the wild solitudes of the moors; indeed Charles Jennings in Up North, his ‘travels beyond the Watford Gap’, an only half-humorous exploration of regional difference, complains that the North is deficient in open space. In the current ...”

“... Dimbleby adds, by way of rumour, that Major and Hurd regarded the outgoing governor, Sir David Wilson (who was sacked to make way for Patten), ‘as one of the principal advocates of the “appeasement” of China, an approach which they believed could no longer be sustained after the atrocity of Tiananmen Square in June 1989’. But, while he avoids ...”

“... recognised by contemporaries: ‘one of the great minds and imaginations of our day’, Edmund Wilson wrote in the 1920s, ‘absolutely comparable’ to ‘the Nietzsches, the Tolstoys, the Wagners and the Ibsens of a previous generation’.All literary magnitudes are finite. In the case of great writers, it is understandable that their vices should ...”