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“... at the age of 30 has a 20 per cent likelihood of marriage, at 35 a 5 per cent chance, and at 40 no more than a 1.3 per cent chance.’ The ‘study’ was an immediate hit. It was discussed in newspapers, on television news and talk shows, and in movies, magazines, advertisements and greeting cards. The message was clear. Educated women were to feel ...”

“... Road to work in the Cambridge Reference Library, a dark Victorian building behind the Town Hall (gaslit in memory, though it surely can’t have been), where George III was about to make his second entrance. Sometime that autumn I bought, at Deighton Bell in Trinity Street, a copy of George III and the Politicians by Richard Pares, a book I have ...”

“... beneath the dense sky of moratorium agreements: the best we can hope for Europe ... But there is no escape route in sight. You feel you are standing at bay. Australia is not a way out.Christa Wolf, CassandraThe city of Sydney has one decent road to the airport because of the Queen’s visit in 1963; the royal nostrils were not to be assaulted by the stink ...”

“... For a time, early last year, there was no trace of Robespierre to be found on the street where he lived in the days of his fame. The restaurant called Le Robespierre had closed its doors, and after a while its portrait sign was removed from above the entrance of the house on the rue Saint-Honoré. Once again, the plaque on the wall had been smashed ...”

“... down through the South-West and the South, back to New York and New England. The Bowery dance hall, Niagara Falls and Grand Canyon as tourist attractions, the segregated South, the college campus – these are the springboards for her efforts to comprehend the deep structure of the American world. A left-wing Tocqueville, she is struck by the paradox of ...”

“... when he complained of the ‘dismal work’ of destroying papers that were of ‘absolutely no use for any purpose God or man’s’. Such remarks must sound particularly dismal to Hardy’s modern editors and biographers. They could certainly find a use for his papers. Hardy’s marvellous late harvest of lyric poetry is riddled with ghosts like those ...”

“... a doctrinaire idea, and a whole innocent Russian town to practise on. But in the outcome there is no divergence between idea and reality: in most cases theory and practice have fused, which is what makes the novel so frightening. The exception is the superannuated old liberal, Stepan Trofimovich, an idealist in his writings and something more abject in his ...”

“... construction. The second section of Part I, recounting a visit by the young Wyatt to Paris, serves no structural function – it’s also turgid, but that’s the weather of the book. Much of The Recognitions is set in New York, where Wyatt arrives after reading for the ministry and realising that his vocation is as a painter. In childhood he acquired the idea ...”

“... in Baghdad until June last year, kept a slush fund of nearly $600 million cash for which there is no paperwork: $200 million of this was kept in a room in one of Saddam’s former palaces, and the US soldier in charge used to keep the key to the room in his backpack, which he left on his desk when he popped out for lunch. Again, this is Iraqi money, not US ...”

“... meningitis in 1878 aged 17, with Edward and Minnie at his bedside. ‘I never, his mother never, no master ever found any falsehood in his life,’ Edward stated in a private memorial written soon afterwards. The loss staggered him: ‘It has changed all my views of God’s work as it is to be done both in this world and the next.’ Eleven years later he ...”

“... which I could not rouse myself from all that day. When I began to write, it seemed to me there was no point in writing. Katherine won’t read it. Katherine’s my rival no longer.While Mansfield was alive, Woolf had found her ‘cheap and hard’, ‘unpleasant’ and ‘utterly unscrupulous’. It bothered her that she ...”

“... and the experience of living with Kind (who was ‘anything but’) taught Streisand independence. No one was going to tell her what to do; her family called her ‘fabrent, which means “on fire” in Yiddish’. She liked sitting under the table and listening to the adults’ conversations. She developed an unexplainable clicking in her ear and refused to ...”

“... he has got lost on his way home and said strange things like he could feel his brain burning. ‘No, I’m not going,’ I say, when he returns from the hospital with antibiotics, having just drunk something called a ‘GI cocktail’. But he tells me I have to, in the strongest possible terms. He says: ‘I will be upset if you don’t.’‘Maybe the pope ...”

“... of perpetual transience?’ Kraus asks. ‘To remain in one place is either privation or luxury. No one I know who’s died in my lifetime … has been interred in a grave.’Born in 1947 in New York City, Kathy Acker lived and worked as an adult in lots of places, most significantly downtown Manhattan, San Diego, London and San Francisco, with long spells ...”

“... a way that fits her restless temperament. When Mungo makes friends with a Catholic boy, she raises no religious objection, even saying that she ‘winched’ his father (kissed or dated). For a Protestant to drink Buckfast Tonic Wine might seem a marginally ecumenical act, since it was originally made by Benedictine monks in Devon. Not drinking with the ...”