“... them, it could mind them.’Feeney balances this material against evasion and omission – the John McGahern and Anne Enright school of hiding trauma in narrative cracks. As You Were is haunted by the abuses of women in recent Irish history. Between 1925 and 1961 a maternity home for unmarried mothers and their children operated in Tuam, a large town in ...”

“... England is determinedly – interminably – drab: a land of supermarket cheese counters and John Lewis carrier bags, rendered in meat-and-potatoes prose with neither eye nor time for beauty.Nowhere drabber than in A Helping Hand, which mostly takes place in a ‘featureless’ London suburb:The land that stretched around them was as featureless as ...”

“... radicals. He published Toward Democracy (1883), and this brought new friends, notably Havelock Ellis. Out of this collaboration came the impulse to complete his theoretical work by writing, not just on the banalities of the money economy, but on ‘intermediate sexual types’ and their place in a revolutionary future. Market-gardening and agitation: on ...”

“... after which a framing story loops back towards the book’s first sentence. Along with the Being John Malkovich effect that Hemon gets by surrounding Pronek with other versions of himself, all this just about dovetails with his thematic concerns. A sense of ‘stale disreality’ with regard to personal identity afflicts all his displaced characters sooner ...”

“... Havelock Ellis has sent me the sixth volume of his studies, Sex in Relation to Society,’ Freud wrote to Jung, in late April 1910. ‘Unfortunately my receptivity is consumed by my nine analyses. But I shall set it aside for the holidays along with the wonderful Schreber.’ Freud is here referring to the famous case of Daniel Paul Schreber, whose Memoirs of his nervous illness had appeared in 1903, and constitute one of the most celebrated case-studies of paranoia in the literature ...”

“... had a crush on. She throws herself on the mercy of a mad, obsessive fan. The minor story concerns John, an evil Coke-monster Hollywood film producer of huge-budget action movies. After a near-death experience with the flu – ‘His heart leapt with the knowledge that it wasn’t drugs or excessive living that had his jaws chattering like a tree full of ...”

“... There’s a scene in Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction in which John Travolta’s character, a hitman called Vincent Vega, who has escorted his boss’s wife home after an evening out, returns from the bathroom to find her unconscious on the floor. Mia (Uma Thurman) has taken a bag of heroin from his jacket pocket and, mistaking the white powder for cocaine, snorted a line and collapsed ...”

“... his generally liberal attitudes to sexual ethics it is not surprising that he belonged. Havelock Ellis (not a homosexual) was a founder member. Peters, without providing evidence, states that ‘there is agreement that the society was dominated by homosexuals.’ This is what one would expect of such a group, though the three members she names are ...”

“... seems a let down.’ The first dedicated leather bar in San Francisco, the Why Not? – on Ellis Street in the Tenderloin – didn’t open until 1960 and was quickly shut down. Its successor, the Tool Box, opened the next year on the corner of Harrison and 4th, thus beginning leather’s long association with the South of Market neighbourhood.Assuming ...”

“... very much on the minds of the authors of the new three-volume biography of D.H. Lawrence, of which John Worthen’s D.H. Lawrence: The Early Years 1885-1912 is the first instalment. The theory, as Worthen explains it, is that having three different people write the life will be ‘an explicit (even dramatic) acknowledgment that, however, important the ...”

“... a horse-drawn harvester set off against a silver sea – over half a page. Clough Williams-Ellis stretched Tyneham’s view of Worbarrow Bay over the end-papers of his passionately-argued conservationist volume Britain and the Beast. There could scarcely have been a more evocative picture of an England that, in the Thirties, was endangered but still ...”

“... an unmistakable resemblance to Coward. Hall’s heroine Stephen Gordon (Radclyffe Hall was called John for most of her adult life) knows that Brockett, a playwright with soft white hands and an effeminate voice, is a man ‘who would never require more of her than she could give’. When they visit Versailles together he talks to her about Marie Antoinette ...”

“... more distinguished magazines left standing ($2400 to Scrutiny in 1949, and a whopping $22,500 to John Crowe Ransom’s Kenyon Review over the course of five years, from 1947 to 1952). Literary prestige was, on occasion, converted into capital, as in the case of Cid Corman’s Origin, an important venue for Charles Olson and the Black Mountain School of ...”

“... Peter and I began to meet at Bertorelli’s for wine, talk, food and more wine. At my suggestion, John Tagg the critic and historian of photography joined our meetings. The three of us agreed – a pretty cynical move – to ask Cork, the new editor of Studio International whom Peter knew as a Cambridge connection, to make up this Gang of Four. The idea was ...”

“... of the IWW, the Communist Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Louis Tikas (a union leader gunned down in John D. Rockefeller Jr’s ‘Ludlow Massacre’ of striking copper miners and their families), but also recognises the corporate and state industrial violence and denial of labour freedom that was a distinctive feature of the ‘American ...”