“... in Edward Albee’s play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (first produced in 1962, filmed with Elizabeth Taylor playing Martha in 1966), referring to a line spoken by Bette Davis in King Vidor’s 1949 film Beyond the Forest, and one man’s sexual desire for another? How is it that an Australian readership in 2000 can be expected to pick up these distant ...”

“... pages – the stellar cast includes Lillian Hellman, Mary McCarthy, Truman Capote, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Penn Warren, Peter Matthiessen, Philip Roth, Irwin Shaw and the always vivacious William Burroughs (‘He is an absolutely astonishing personage, with the grim mad face of Savonarola and a hideously tailored 1925 shit-coloured overcoat ...”

“... a conventional education, at Gakushuin, Japan’s grandest school; among his English tutors was Elizabeth Vining, an American Quaker, who nicknamed him ‘Jimmy’. ‘His interests in those days were almost entirely confined to fish,’ she wrote later, ‘and I felt they needed broadening.’ The influence of this American pacifist on the young prince was ...”

“... The only Democratic leaders who are known to many Americans are Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, and their combined age is 220. How did that happen? The Clinton-Obama dollar tree cast a shade for a quarter-century in which smaller political fortunes have struggled even to breathe. Meanwhile, the Democrats remain in denial about the charm of ...”

“... man in his life. Maugham eventually married Syrie for the child’s sake – their daughter, Elizabeth, was born in 1915 – but he continued to see Haxton. Gossip proliferated. Maugham, it was said, had taken to hiding behind the sofa whenever his ‘coarse and irritating’ wife was at home. Fanciful tales about the exotic arrangements required to ...”

“... misappropriating $8.6 billion of clients’ money or of the scam run by ex-Stanford student Elizabeth Holmes, who raised $700 million for Theranos, a company whose sole product was a medical technology that didn’t exist. Holmes, who used to live in a $15 million mansion and fly in a private Theranos jet, is doing time in federal prison for defrauding ...”

“... California,’ Didion records, ‘equipped with two “good” suits, a box of unanswered mail, Elizabeth Hardwick’s Seduction and Betrayal, Edmund Wilson’s To the Finland Station, six Judy Blume books and my 11-year-old daughter. The Judy Blume books were along to divert my daughter. The daughter was along to divert me.’By that stage in her young ...”

“... relationship was finally put under intolerable strain when Amis started an affair with the writer Elizabeth Jane Howard. Almost immediately, this affair threatened to be different from its innumerable predecessors because Kingsley fell passionately in love with Jane. Hilly finally walked out on him; he and Jane set up together, marrying in 1965. This seems to ...”

“... juxtapositions reflect the changes and instabilities of the culture itself. Someone born under Elizabeth might, just possibly, have lived into Anne’s reign. The Restoration writer looks back to Donne and forward to Defoe. There is a gulf between, say, Marvell’s ‘green’ poems and his political verses, and some of the first may be contemporary with ...”

“... newspapers,’ Mervyn Leroy said. Some performers were born stars (Katharine Hepburn, Greta Garbo, Elizabeth Taylor, Barbra Streisand), some achieved stardom (Marlene Dietrich, Humphrey Bogart, Cary Grant, Bette Davis, Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe), some had stardom thrust upon them (Lana Turner, Jimmy Stewart, John Wayne, Myrna Loy, Barbara Stanwyck). ‘More ...”

“... comments to question the representativeness of her experience. They’d been taught the work of Elizabeth Anscombe and Philippa Foot in the 1980s! Could things be as bad as all that? ‘Probably not,’ someone called Brian replied.To suggest that a culture of sexism might be disproved by the presence of a few women who are granted exceptional status ...”

“... non-places kept in a persistent vegetative state, like the Gothic mass of the neighbouring Queen Elizabeth Hospital for Children in Hackney Road, until the right development package comes along. And meanwhile spiders knit their spectral nets. Shivering phantoms stand before empty mirrors in white-tiled washrooms where the taps leak coal ...”

“... as Jenny Diski noted in What I Don’t Know about Animals (2010). People need to eat, and even Elizabeth Costello carried a leather handbag, and anyway, veggiebragging is boring and self-obsessed. Worse than that, it’s sentimental – like pro-Life-ism, with which Haraway draws a parallel – and a cover for cruelty (forcing a woman to give birth to a ...”

“... surveyed by drones, or hard-hat visionaries in helicopters, from heights where even the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park looks great, is only there to be explained, improved, colonised and captured. So? So? So what?So when I think I’m moving across a city of memories, where I have lived and worked for fifty years, I find that, very soon, I lose the markers ...”

“... metropolitan area and on the south coast.Every time I take the long escalator down to the Elizabeth Line, or contemplate the implications of our compulsive burrowing into the radiant future promised by developers, I wonder about the psychic damage being inflicted on London as a living organism. ‘Intercept, store and ultimately transfer’ is the ...”