“... sharpened by comments on his physical appearance (he had a strangely bulbous head and as a child was reckoned to be hydrocephalic), his intense and platitudinous solemnity, his late-won and unsmiling Roman Catholicism. Tate once said that all his poems sprang from the suffering that comes from disbelief, and perhaps his love pursuits were similarly ...”

“... to 1798, but there is nothing, as far as I know, at Scullabogue. Its memory was erased from what a child could learn about 1798. It was a complication in our glorious past, and it was essential for our past to be glorious if our present, in what Roy Foster in his new book of essays calls ‘the disillusioned tranquillity of the Free State’, was to have any ...”

“... rates, post-mortem practices, including the use of bodies for anatomical study in hospitals, child welfare, adoption practices, and – in some of the homes – the use of babies for vaccine trials without their mothers’ consent. In April 2019 the commission published its first significant report, which focused on the burial, or the lack of proper ...”

“... be confused with the evil progressivism of the Little Red Schoolbook, with its instructions to the child on drug-taking, and the therapeutic use of porn and oral sex. One has to equate Anthea’s book with Holbrook’s own English for the Rejected (1964), a work which significantly influenced primary-school teaching in this country. Anthea receives an ...”

“... By the time Feigen posed the question to her in 1970, Nochlin had given birth to her first child, a daughter; become a feminist; and organised her first class on ‘Women and Art’ at Vassar, where she had returned to teach. These events were, she said, ‘interconnected’ (though did she really equate having a baby with writing a new syllabus?).Her ...”

“... remote prints of reality. Meanwhile, on the same afternoon, the nominated patsy/marksman, Lee Harvey Oswald, who looked nothing like the potential presidential assassins played by Frank Sinatra (in Suddenly) or Laurence Harvey (in The Manchurian Candidate), slid ticketless into the Texas Theatre in Dallas, for a double bill that would otherwise have ...”

“... of MEK members after the invasion, concluded that the organisation was a cult; that the weirdly child-free Camp Ashraf was ‘a human tragedy’; that members were ‘misused and misled’ by the leadership; and that many had been tricked into joining. The MEK has used various recruitment methods. The organisation’s elite joined in Iran before the ...”

“... exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries, which included Man Ray’s dreamy Lovers, showing Lee Miller’s lips floating above green hills, Meret Oppenheim’s fur-covered teacup and saucer and Eileen Agar’s objets trouvés – shells, nets and pieces of rusted metal. More than a thousand people went to the opening, at which the performance artist ...”

“... Taken in the 1950s, it shows Baker’s mother and sister with her nephew’s French wife and child in the Baker family château, Les Milandes. As well as bringing black St Louis to the French countryside, Baker had acquired what she called a ‘rainbow tribe’ of adopted children. At Les Milandes, which received nearly half a million tourists a ...”

“... had taken more than a year for Roe v. Wade to reach the court, Roe must already have delivered a child, or miscarried, or found a way to have an abortion after all. The court batted this challenge away. ‘Pregnancy often comes more than once to the same woman,’ the majority decided. ‘If man is to survive, it will always be with us.’ Otherwise, Roe ...”

“... was an abundance. We brought order wherever we went’), or a female avenger, at times a Bruce Lee in drag. She defeats a giant, who changes into his true shape, a snake – whereupon his disgusted soldiers pledge their loyalty to her. Her followers, she remarks in a nice aside, never knew she was a woman: ‘Chinese executed women who disguised themselves ...”

“... to and fro between Cork and London by boat and train. It was a hot summer and my nanny, Kitty Lee, would take me to swim in the sea and build sandcastles on the long sandy beaches. One day in late September, Kitty and I walked into Youghal to visit my cousin Shirley, with whom I often played. She turned out not to be home, but her mother thought I looked ...”

“... is transformed by her style: something interesting must always be done with what’s there. ‘The child entered this room unknown to her with an inhuman absence of awe or interest. She took her bearings, but in an abstract way – the draped dishevelled big bed, prodigal dressing table, strewn sofa …’ Alice Munro is at the plain end of the spectrum of ...”

“... Captain Thompson – ‘motionless, remote and enigmatical’ – piled on the agony with fog, a lee-shore and a lost anchor cable, Conrad explained that he would ‘back the bow anchor and tail the heaviest hawser on board on the end of the chain before letting go, and if she parted from that, which is quite likely, I would just do nothing. She would have ...”

“... while the arduous labour of mastering the language discouraged young men from getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, and other delinquencies lamented by Shakespeare’s Old Shepherd. Even the Chinese mode of consuming alcohol was so well controlled that hangovers were virtually unknown. The large numbers of male prostitutes in evidence called for ...”