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“... and carrying baskets of maize and gourds. Although no image of the Burford monument is included in Lauren Working’s A Golden World, a quick online search confirms the accuracy of the book’s description of the sculpted subjects, whose ‘angular features look jarringly modern, a kind of Renaissance art deco’.Neither Bacon nor Harman ...”

“... space inside which lovely things can flourish while the world outside it continues to go to hell. Lauren Oya Olamina, the visionary heroine of Octavia Butler’s Parable books, lived until she was 18 in a gated neighbourhood in Robledo, southern California, with her clever father, a Baptist preacher, and resourceful stepmother, who kept a garden with ...”

“... what he considered to be the most felicitous combinations of those objects and images: photos of Lauren Bacall arranged to look as if they could be in a penny arcade, a Renaissance prince framed in a vending machine, a baby doll in a forest of twigs, a painted lady in a French hotel, marbles among the stars and ballerinas in the sky – each box a dreamed ...”

“... fades away from her life until she is about to graduate and needs a job. Cory, a good guy from a working-class family of Portuguese immigrants, wants to start a microfinance app with his friends but takes a consulting job in Manila instead. Miraculously, he and Greer are still together, and his decision ruins their plan to move to a cute Brooklyn ...”

“... The​ protagonist of Fake Accounts, Lauren Oyler’s first novel, is a thirty-something writer with a job in digital media. She spends ‘all day on the internet, and especially on Twitter, ostensibly looking for stories but mainly just looking’. It’s January 2017, just after Donald Trump’s election, and something’s up ...”

“... uses her fixation on twists and twistedness to reflect the power dynamic between men and women as working like a finger trap rather than a game someone eventually wins. Ellie, a lifelong biter with ‘no lover, no ambition, no close friends’ (no reason), must repress her fantasies of gnawing on colleagues because ‘the difference between children and ...”

“... has an illicit clock in his office, as well as a mobile phone he plays games on while the men are working.) The pros, cons and realities of both staying and fighting and of leaving are listed. Staying and fighting is complicated, because the women do not believe in violence, because it would involve writing a manifesto of demands and because they might ...”

“... delivers funny little zaps to the main character’s perspective. In ‘Parrot’, a young woman working as a temp laughs at a co-worker – ‘every office must have someone sad to laugh at’ – and the man who will become her husband scolds her: ‘That man is depressed.’ ‘How do you know that?’ she asked. ‘How do you not?’ In an essay ...”

“... on her father’s computer, which he had left displaying websites about sharia because he was working on a lecture; she believed she was justified in exploring his open internet windows because he was cheating on her mother. ‘I thought I wouldn’t understand a word but everything was there,’ Sawyer continues. ‘So simple and beautiful. The ...”

“... a please-don’t-let-it-happen-to-me kind of sympathy; Adèle inspires amazement that, as a working mother, she has time to fit in quite so many lovers. Myriam is so fulfilled by her work that it doesn’t matter if her salary is cancelled out by the nanny’s; Adèle doesn’t feel that satisfaction. Myriam does so well at her (largely off-stage) job ...”

“... London bookstalls – that middle-class litterateurs like himself knew (and cared) less about working-class literature than about Lapland. In a much quoted essay twenty years later, Wilkie Collins, after a similar expedition, coined the phrase ‘the Unknown Public’. It was something of a misnomer since the public was well enough known. It was their ...”

“... be cut loose and sent off to the margins of society. You might also, if Kay Redfield Jamison and Lauren Slater’s books are any indication of present trends, choose either to become a creative artist or, if the muse doesn’t speak, train as a clinical psychologist. Nowadays, it seems, you can be a success or a failure as a mad person. As if mental disarray ...”

“... the 1970s and 1980s, were translated into English by Geraldine Harcourt, with whom she had a close working relationship. (Just one of her later novels has been translated, by Dennis Washburn: Laughing Wolf, a tale of two itinerant children travelling through postwar Japan, published in 2000.) In her early work, Tsushima often wrote about the world of young ...”

“... kicking butt, Paglia quickly became a media celebrity, who hit the gossip columns when the model Lauren Hutton took her to the National Motorcycle Show in Manhattan, and posed for Vanity Fair in full make-up and a bulging décolletage, her arms around the bare biceps of the two black bodyguards she calls ‘my centurions’. In the introduction to Sex, Art ...”

“... with Humphrey Bogart repeating his classic 1936 role, Henry Fonda doing Leslie Howard, and Lauren Bacall as Bette Davis. The show went well. Bogart, always a bit of a snob, and once chucked out of Andover, was impressed that Dunne had been to Williams College. He invited the nobody kid to a party at his home in the Holmby Hills. Dunne knew he was out ...”