“... resembles the taunting wife Deborah in Mailer’s An American Dream, both so archetypal in their Susan Hayward histrionics that no one could confuse them as stand-ins for All Women. They’re formidable foes, not composite specimens. With Mr Sammler’s Planet, generalisations begin to creep in about women and their sloshy nature (‘female effluence … a ...”

“... emotion. Some writers confront that emotion head on:whosoever shovels a couple of tablespoons of rose bath salts under the billowing faucet and marvels at their vermilion colour, whosoever bends by hand her sclerotic limbs, as if reassuring himself about the condition of a hinge, whosoever has kissed his mother on the part that separates the lobes of her ...”

“... in 1895, of workers leaving a factory. The craggiest reflection on the centenary came from Susan Sontag – an instantly notorious essay, less birthday card than death certificate. The history of the medium took the shape of a life-cycle, she argued, and we were now in the stage of ‘irreversible decline’. Sontag mourned the loss of cinephilia, the ...”

“... daughter of a judge who never lied and a scholar who always did. That was A.S. Byatt. Christened Susan, what on earth, she was later known as Dame Antonia. Byatt wrote about sugar and snails and sex cults and the dead children of children’s book authors. She wrote about William Morris and Mariano Fortuny. She wrote about Cambridge, where she and her sister ...”

“... of Coney Island and the Rockefeller Centre; and, after one of the two empires had disappeared, Susan Buck-Morss, who in Dreamworld and Catastrophe (2000) shifted from elegiac speculations about the death of utopia to the low comedy of the resemblance between Stalin’s unbuilt Palace of the Soviets – a skyscraper topped by a giant Lenin – and its ...”

“... it.’ The task was to liberate the novel from the ‘tyranny of significations’, an idea that Susan Sontag soon lifted in Against Interpretation. Depth, character and humanism, as Robbe-Grillet saw it, were ‘obsolete notions’ that stood in the way of what Barthes called the pleasure of the text, and Sontag the ‘erotics of art’. Robbe-Grillet ...”

“... under his sack of boundary stones. They didn’t mutter curses as they fastened their wings And rose in widening farewell circles. They grieved for the garden growing smaller below them, Soon to exist only as a story That every day grows harder to believe. Carl Dennis, ‘Loss’ ‘Multitude’ is defined in Webster’s as ‘the state of being ...”

“... anything in the 1990s, yet between 2005 and 2008 prices soared: wheat and maize grown in the US rose by about 130 per cent; so did American soya, which goes mostly to animal feed. Dairy prices shot up (butter by 74 per cent, powdered milk by 69 per cent); the price of chicken went up by two-thirds. A month before the banking meltdown in 2008, ‘food ...”

“... and it’s true, the pint-sized Louise wasn’t exactly an oil painting. Having Susan Boyle eyebrows didn’t help. But she and Bernhardt – who studied sculpture with her (and achieved something rather more than mere amateur competence) – unquestionably had an amitié douce for life. Sometime in the late 1870s they posed for a ...”

“... The Siamese twins, without separating, get married. ‘Perhaps the scariest scene in Freaks,’ Susan Sontag writes in On Photography, ‘is the wedding banquet, when pinheads, bearded women, Siamese twins and living torsos dance and sing their acceptance of the wicked, normal-sized Cleopatra, who has just married the gullible midget hero.’ This ...”

“... bashing the naysaying reviewers as muckers, yahoos and ‘humpty-beaters’, strewing a rose petal path of compliments (‘a perfectly decent and honourable book very well written for much of its length’, ‘gifted with an agreeable variety of aperçus on matters such as status, class, privilege and clan’, ‘an interesting book, very ...”

“... is little of the ideologue in Varda despite her choice of subject matter. Elsa la rose (1965) is an experimental filmic portrait of her close friends Louis Aragon and his wife, the novelist Elsa Triolet. Varda has Michel Piccoli recite Aragon’s indulgent love poems to Triolet over a re-enactment of their first meeting at the Café Coupole ...”

“... seduced Emily Dickinson’s brother, Austin, 27 years her senior, and destroyed his marriage to Susan Gilbert, Emily’s closest confidante. Like any good seductress, Todd was an opportunist. She exploited Austin’s role as the treasurer of Amherst College to wangle her own husband, David, into powerful university positions and forced him to build her a ...”

“... of rain, or at the end of Lewis’s The Last Battle, with poor old Narnia dark and broken and Susan, with her disgusting lipstick and her nylons, shut out. Sex happens because it has to happen: there wouldn’t be much of a human race without it. And the existence of sex acts like a sentry – like Milton’s cherubim at the gates of Eden – preventing ...”

“... then Little Men then Jo’s Boys. In Sunset Song, we read that Chris was particularly fond of Susan Coolidge’s What Katy Did and its sequels – ‘she loved Katy and envied her and wished like Katy she lived at a school, not tramping back in the spleiter of a winter night to help muck the byre, with the smell of the sharn rising feuch! in her ...”