“... divider of Interstate 5: when her fingers were prised loose from the fence 12 hours later, the child pointed out that she had run after the car containing her family for ‘a long time’. All of us are excited by what we most deplore – ‘especially’, as Miss Didion says in another context, ‘if we are writers’. Miss Didion used to be excited by ...”

“... the lover in the lyric sequence Plain-chant (1923) to the uncanny eyes painted on the eyelids of Lee Miller in his 1930 film Le Sang d’un poète. He kept returning to the pivotal moment in the myth of Orpheus when a sudden, interlocked gaze sends Eurydice back to the unseen shades. Despite the connections, his work is remarkable for its eclecticism: he ...”

“... But the situation of the fertile handmaid in Atwood’s novel – forcibly separated from her own child and made to live in the house of a rich man who hasn’t managed to produce babies with his chilly, blonde wife and who regularly rapes her – clearly borrows, as Lewis says, from ‘the historical experience of … the American plantation’ while ...”

“... it: ‘the adjectives Pearce and Newton chose to describe the everyday life of mother and child are “phobic”, “psychotic” and “miserable”; common nouns are “anger”, “jealousy” and “blackmail”.’In 1955 Clement Greenberg, critic-in-chief to New York’s avant-garde art scene, had a breakdown after being dumped by the young ...”

“... violence) chip into television sets, invent epidemics of teen pregnancy, pre-teen murder and child abuse (the Attorney-General Janet Reno brought that obsession from Florida to ignite the conflagration at Waco) and sponsor regulation of the family relations of the poor. Like Gingrich and Bob Dole, Clinton proposes to help poor children by ending their ...”

“... to Lowell, she explained that her therapy at Payne Whitney had helped her understand how as a child she learned to mutilate herself ‘in order to gain pity and love’. In her finest novel, The Mountain Lion (1947), written during the turbulent final year of their marriage, the young heroine Molly pours acid over her hand after quarrelling with her ...”

“... of the life lived as it was; and the way you look at her relations with Sartre, with his own child prodigy’s life, and at their milieu is unavoidably a political matter. Some authorities insist on regarding her as a great philosopher’s rather tiresome consort: Arthur C. Danto, who wrote the lively Modern Masters essay on Sartre, is at pains to ...”

“... to the left is eight-year-old Mary Louisa, named after her mother and also known as ‘Isa’. The child sitting on the floor with the rosy-cheeked doll between her legs is Julia, the youngest at four. In old age she remembered that she had christened the doll ‘Popau’ – the nickname of the right-wing politician and journalist Paul de Cassagnac, famous ...”

“... they just don’t apply in a Singaporean context,’ says the Seni0r Minister of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew. (Bell bases Lee’s arguments on his published writings and speeches, which he skilfully edits into a debate with an imaginary American interlocutor.) Lee may have an ...”

“... According to family legend, a circle of flame appeared above his mother’s bed. Pico was a child prodigy in Latin and Greek, with a miraculous memory. As a young teen he went to Bologna to study canon law, and then roved the university towns of Italy and France seeking ever more esoteric knowledge. In Padua, he learned Hebrew and the philosophy of ...”

“... just as in the Sierra in winter there can be small cavities beneath several feet of snow – a child can be running along in the fun and the chatter and go straight down a hole and be lost for ever. How long does the child stay alive in the white hole, waiting, wondering and helpless? Don’t ask. Joan Didion is from ...”

“... It is probably not irrelevant that Elizabeth Bowen to all intents lost her father when she was a child (his mind became temporarily unhinged), and that her mother died when she was 13. Although she had warm-hearted relatives to love and care for her, she could guess what it might be like to be as lonely and unbefriended as Portia Quayne. Such a novel as I ...”

“... up in the apartment of his estranged wife. Lianne is a freelance copy-editor, the mother of his child. She is a quiet New Yorker who holds the family together: her son, her aged mother, and now, once again, Keith. The opening two sections of the book treat the days and weeks after the towers’ fall. Keith might have been just another aggressive DeLilloan ...”

“... He has said a good deal already – the little boy who wants to be like his father, the sheltered child who doesn’t need to know the time or even the season because James, the always reliable butler, deals with that, the illusion of a dedication to poetry. Adrian Wright, in this new biography, refers several times to Lehmann’s half-commitment (in spite of ...”

“... they send workaday reality into situations where reality is a stranger, and behave like the older child at the magic show, the one who sees how the trick is done and can’t help shouting out the news, again and again, until the magician is undone and the children are depressed. Jacobs, unknown to himself, has clearly spent his life yearning to be the ...”