“... here that Nettel’s taut plot takes off. There have already been clues that Alina’s pregnancy may prove complicated. Laura, who used to dabble in tarot and astrology, has glimpsed tragedy in her friend’s fate. There is also the book’s suggestive title. During Alina’s third trimester, it is confirmed: her baby, a girl she has already named ...”

“... West, Rosamond Lehmann, Elizabeth Taylor, Barbara Comyns and Antonia White. White’s Frost in May, another study of the horrors of convent life, was one of Virago’s first notable successes when it was reissued in 1978. Other writers she championed had truly been forgotten: on Desert Island Discs, she chose Henry Handel Richardson’s Maurice Guest as ...”

“... in college. But there was a problem: all Kaepernick ever wanted to do was play football.The NFL may be a slave system, but as Kaepernick saw it, baseball was just as bad and in some ways worse. It is a sport that has bought into its own mythology. The young Kaepernick was constantly being reminded that baseball must be played in the true spirit of the ...”

“... space-filling stability of three times four? In other words, the first term of Twelve Caesars may have ‘mattered’ to European visual culture no less than the second. If so, Beard’s theme isn’t necessarily diminished, but it is repositioned. She only glancingly relates her emperor images to the saint images of the Twelve Apostles. But surely ...”

“... the hope that these will help them to track down one of the two surviving bombers. A bit late, you may think, given that the bombings took place nearly fifty years ago, and my investigation, which led to the release of six innocent men, was concluded in 1991. What kept them so long? The short answer is that for many years the West Midlands Police, in common ...”

“... under Sergei Diaghilev – ‘Big Serge’, as she always called him – or about her husband ‘May-nar’ (with the emphasis on the second syllable).Lydia lived in a substantial house called Tilton at the foot of Firle Beacon, one of the highest of the South Downs. It was set among farm buildings, a pond and a handful of cottages. It could be reached from ...”

“... conscious of itself and its market, with such a managed sense of mission. The Great American Novel may be either a rumour or an expression (like the Great White Whale), but the Great East German Novel was definitely a Project. Something that would square honesty and hope, ideology and life. A top-down product that contrived to appear bottom-up. Aesthetics was ...”

“... language has by now the look of rusting aluminium. Most of the poetry may be null, but the Ginsberg Story, well and lucidly told here by an admirer, is absorbingly interesting. Ginsberg was born in 1926, the grandson of Russian Jews who were firmly settled in the United States when his father Louis and his mother Naomi were ...”

“... stuff, and – if you accept that underdevelopment is a problem needing a solution – he may be fairly criticised for failing to provide his own answers, despite a half-hearted suggestion that aid be linked to human rights and curbs on military spending. Indeed, he is torn between his desire to see aid abolished and his desire to see it ...”

“... of, Hess was free on bail in West Germany, awaiting trial for espionage. His friend disappeared in May 1987. ‘In an isolated forest outside of Hanover,’ Stoll reports, ‘police found his charred bones next to a melted can of gasoline... No suicide note was found.’ In his own quiet way, Stoll becomes a hero. He is invited to give talks in Washington and ...”

“... role to play. In Hitchcock innocence says, ‘I didn’t do it’; in McEwan it says, ‘I may have done it but you have to hear the whole story,’ or, ‘I did it, but only because I was ambushed by some stranger hiding in my personality, some other self I wasn’t prepared to meet.’ By Gothic I mean that moment in a fiction when all the emotions ...”

“... indomitable. He wrote to the Trowbridge Female Radical Association (an organisation which I fear may not exist today): ‘ ’Tis true indeed that the jail beds in Salisbury are not made of roses; but whether for weal or woe, for victory or death, my mind is made up: come what will and when it will, it is my determination to live and die in the people’s ...”

“... at home in the country but to work in the office, the bank, the shop and the university, women who may have neither husbands nor children nor country houses, who come back at night to rented urban flats where they can catch up on their paperwork amid Laura Ashley curtains and cushions. The note she sounded apparently strikes more deeply than the surface ...”

“... explosion of happiness. Otherwise there doesn’t seem to be much happiness about, though that may be an impression created by her deadpan, sourpuss recording of events. Still, all that sex must have been fun as well as funny. It’s funny in a Feydeau way, by virtue of the quantity and speed of almost overlapping lays. Fidelity was neither expected nor ...”

“... by human beings. Padel also suggests that the use of animal metaphors to describe mental states may derive from a literal belief in the possibility that animals, or at least certain animals, have access to a kind of knowledge unavailable to human beings. In particular, animals that were able to move in ways different to humans were thought to have a direct ...”