“... this with Mrs Thatcher, along with a few other similarities. I was always a bit embarrassed when Margaret Thatcher appeared on the television in the 1970s and 1980s; I felt I was watching a close relative. My mother was ambitious only for her family and not the entire nation, but still, it sometimes seemed an accident that she taught at the local ...”

“... too, for the middle-class unmarried motherhood plot: Lynne Reid Banks, The L-Shaped Room (1960); Margaret Drabble, The Millstone (1965). That phrase, ‘bad taste’ (‘mauvais goût’), gives us a clue to what Ernaux has been reading. Pierre Bourdieu’s Les Héritiers: les étudiants et la culture (The Inheritors: French Students and Their Relation to ...”

“... third of the novel, they are integral to its greatness, which without them would necessarily be a lesser, more monotone affair. The form of the comic thread that runs through it is satire, which is always an attack – derision of a particular target, in this case snobbery, hypocrisy, pretension. In the enclosed world of the Jia-Zhen compound in Cao’s ...”