“... John and Dorothy Reynolds are driving to Mont-St-Michel with their daughter Alison and their niece Linda. They recall a previous visit: Eighteen years ago, they had arrived in Pontorson from Cherbourg, by train, by a series of trains, at five o’clock in the afternoon. They had a reservation at a hotel in Mont-Saint-Michel, but they had got up at daybreak ...”

“... Hangsaman (1951), which charts a young woman’s mental deterioration: she asked to meet Jackson, Linda Wagner-Martin relates in her 1987 biography of Plath, when she was working at Mademoiselle in the summer of 1953. Wagner-Martin has elsewhere called the 1950s ‘the decade of Jackson’, although an interviewer recently put it to Oates that this must have ...”

“... setting. In Yorkshire he lived in a draughty Victorian building, perched high above the desolate black-red streets of Halifax, among the grimmest scoria of the Industrial Revolution. In Worcestershire his home was a Georgian mansion in rolling countryside, once a bishop’s manor. The move allowed Williams, who remembered Thompson’s apostrophe, a sly jest ...”

“... by Great Britain’s defeat of the French Revolution. The scholarship of David Cannadine and Linda Colley has shown how this was done and how vital the monarchy was to the process. The rejigged royal institution was the mechanism for weening an unruly, half-revolutionary people away from its own past. The defeat of France shored up a potent popular ...”

“... would be ‘A Thousand Years of English Expansion’ were coldly received). ‘Britishness,’ Linda Colley has written, ‘was superimposed over an array of internal differences’ in response to contact (and conflict) with the other – i.e. with Catholic and then republican France. In other words, Britishness can exist when the nations of the UK face a ...”

“... friend. It’s 25 years since Tom Nairn first willed the ‘Break-Up of Britain’, and ten since Linda Colley influentially explained that Britons were the product of particular historical conditions – conditions which have now disappeared. We have had the woe-is-England vapourings of Simon Heffer and the rushed observations of Andrew Marr. An academic ...”

“... Sisyphus, I cried for a creature I had never really known. But the arrival last summer of Goose, a black Labrador, means that I too now know what it is to be the object of an animal’s love, and to love her in turn, as I tell her several times a day. She lies next to me as I write, her paws tucked neatly under her otter-smooth head, her body pressed against ...”

“... Hemingway’s own reality than the author could bear. ‘It has become a critical commonplace,’ Linda Patterson Miller writes in her foreword to the present volume, ‘that his wounding as an American Red Cross ambulance driver in World War One scarred him psychologically and led him to create emotionally damaged heroes attempting to live in a troubled ...”

“... lambasted the British government for its petty treatment of him there. In the words of the Black Dwarf, Britain spent vast sums ‘to torture one man abroad, while tens of thousands are starving at home to furnish the expense’. At first glance, the strain of British admiration for Napoleon seems the principal novelty of Semmel’s book. His broader ...”

“... will ultimately furnish the table of a fundraiser for the politician and former wrestling promoter Linda McMahon, then running for Senate and now a member of Trump’s cabinet. But Vuong resists pessimism as much as he claims to resist catharsis. He wants to show that bonds between unlikely people are made in situations of labour (‘Can camaraderie … be ...”

“... The performance was held in a church and it was impossible, since I was then obsessed with the black-metal documentary Until the Light Takes Us, not to imagine the place burning down. I could hear the crackling: floors, ceiling, walls. The Elvis impersonator’s Norwegian tumbled over me, interspersed with uh-huh-huhs, which represented the exact ...”

“... America was one of shiny appliances, finned automobiles with hood ornaments fit for Vikings, black and white television sets piping perky laugh-track entertainment into the living room as the kids did their homework lying on the rug, backyard barbecues, pool parties, and drunken passes and spats at cocktail parties that entered local lore. Updike’s ...”

“... there is a depiction of a failing partnership in La Femme gelée (translated as A Frozen Woman by Linda Coverdale in 1995), the last novel she wrote, which was published in 1981 and is dedicated to Philippe. She began to write non-fiction with the book about her father in 1983, then wrote one about her mother, Une femme, in 1988 (translated as A Woman’s ...”

“... love story’. Opening Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes we read, inside the front cover, white on black in Barthes’s handwriting: Tout ceci doit être considéré comme dit par un personnage de roman. What follows is text and pictures, a fractured autobiography, a dictionary of personal themes, arranged alphabetically. A fiction? Not exactly. Barthes on the ...”

“... the two. At Arizona State University, a campus police officer was recorded violently arresting a black woman faculty member, Professor Ersula Ore, who had refused to show her ID on the street. In November 2011, at the time of Occupy, police pepper-sprayed students as they protested silently against higher tuition fees at UC Davis. A subsequent ...”