“... a part. How often we read a beginner’s review that compares a thin thing to a fat one. ‘John Smith, like Tolstoy, is very interested in the way men interact under the conditions of battle.’ Well, no.It was this assumption of authority that allowed Hardwick to produce ‘The Decline of Book Reviewing’, and to deliver the swift and slashing put-downs ...”

“... never seen.3 May. A distressing call today from Dr C., the oncologist who looked after my friend Anne during her last illness. He talks about hospital services being deliberately run down and the difficulties of ward care due to shortage of staff but it’s only gradually I realise that what he wants is for me to try and write a play about it. I explain what ...”

“... undergoing a metamorphosis that prepared it for capitalism, rather than, like Marx and Adam Smith, seeing capitalism as growing organically out of technological advances and class conflict. Going against both Marxist orthodoxy and English aristocratic amour-propre, Brenner argues that once nobles became rentiers, they joined the bourgeoisie.This new ...”

“... he looked for guidance to Friedrich List, the German economic protectionist, rather than Adam Smith. According to Park, ‘the life of the nation can be developed and grown only through the state.’ As he saw it, the laissez-faire individualism backed by Anglo-American elites encouraged social fragmentation and political strife, making state and ...”

“... the readers alongside, and one of those I got to know in this way was the historian Cecil Woodham-Smith. The author of The Great Hunger, an account of the Irish famine, and The Reason Why, about the events leading up to the Charge of the Light Brigade, Cecil was a frail woman with a tiny birdlike skull, looking more like Elizabeth I (in later life) than Edith ...”

“... his home in Wabansia Avenue was, she explained in Force of Circumstance, ‘very much like the one Anne and Lewis spent together in The Mandarins’, the novel dedicated to Algren: ‘embarrassment, impatience, misunderstanding, fatigue, and finally the intoxication of deep understanding’. The next day he gave her a ‘clunky silver band’, as Bair calls ...”

“... Elif Batuman, Edna Bonhomme, Hazel V. Carby, Linda Colley, Meehan Crist, Anne Enright, Lorna Finlayson, Lisa Hallgarten and Jayne Kavanagh, Sophie Lewis, Maureen N. McLane, Erin Maglaque, Gazelle Mba, Azadeh Moaveni, Toril Moi, Joanne O’Leary, Niela Orr, Lauren Oyler, Susan Pedersen, Jacqueline Rose, Madeleine Schwartz, Arianne Shahvisi, Sophie Smith, Rebecca Solnit, Alice Spawls, Amia Srinivasan, Chaohua Wang, Marina Warner, Bee Wilson, Emily Witt Elif BatumanWhen​ Roe v ...”

“... But prior to that he was in London and he was a prime mover in the Group, he and Edward Lucie-Smith. We attacked them all the time. They were enemies. A lot was going on that we were in opposition to: there was the Group; there was pop poetry; there was the Liverpool Scene. And when Lucie-Smith, arch-organiser of the ...”

“... give great soundbites when it’s about sex,’ she apologises to a furious Riki Anne Wilchins who had invited her to speak, ‘but I always fuck up politics.’ In a wondrous twist, Paris Lees credits Germaine Greer with guiding her to insight on this matter: Greer caused me to question my identity, and form a more complex one. She was ...”

“... her own husband, David, into powerful university positions and forced him to build her a Queen Anne-style house just across from his family home. After his death she conned his surviving sister, Lavinia, into deeding her some land. But, perhaps most damning of all, Emily Dickinson was hardly cold in the grave when Todd made a bid to edit her poems and ride ...”

“... political land-grab. Your browser does not support html5 video. Councillor Kim Taylor-Smith, deputy leader of Kensington and Chelsea Council from September 2017, is asked if the government has been helpful.Headlines seem like wisdom to those who rely on them. ‘Fire Victims Left in Lurch by Chaotic Relief Effort’, ‘Grenfell: The Net Closes ...”