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“... on the first evening he spent with his future wife at the International House in Berkeley in 1941. Sarah Hirschman, as she soon became, was Russian by origin, and they conversed for years in French. Their many letters are among Adelman’s best sources. Hirschman thought he should join the American army. Not to fight perhaps; to do something useful in ...”

“... feed, wash, soothe and scold an infant, and something like a history of mothering comes into view. Sarah Knott privileges anecdote in her account of mothering in Britain and North America over the past four centuries, partly because she wants to think about subjectivity and experience, but also because anecdote implies interruption, distraction and ...”

“... then, was a little girl, she lived in a big house in Durban. The small son of her mother’s maid Sarah was allowed to come and stay for a few weeks every year; the Crankos used to call him ‘Sixpence’. The rest of the year, Sixpence lived miles away in Zululand with his brothers and sisters. Whenever Sarah lost her ...”

“... pointlessly climbed a stick in the forest, pointlessly descend it. The Duke of Nowhere is also the grand old Duke of York. This motif is repeated on a human scale in the inconsequential narrative of ‘The End of the Line’ (the ‘line’ being both railway and story), where a nameless woman speculates about the only other passenger on the train to the ...”

“... Sarah Hrdy is tough-minded about a tender subject. Motherhood, she says, is a minefield. Mothers love babies passionately – but not unconditionally. We have evolved as adept sociobiologists, able to calculate love. On the other side of the relationship, baby love is unconditional, indeed desperate. Babies want it all, every scrap of attention they can command, at least up to the point where the mother would be so exhausted that her failure would rebound on the baby itself ...”

“... too much; she flirts, most inappropriately, with married acquaintances; she deludes herself on a grand scale, and rounds shrieking on anyone who attempts to disillusion her. If necessary, she will fake a fit to make a point. In one memorable incarnation, she gets drunk at a party and deposits a ‘slick mouthful of puke’ on her son’s pillow. On two ...”

“... definitions and differences in sense. The stories of these volunteers form the backbone of Sarah Ogilvie’s book.Murray edited the OED from his grandly named ‘Scriptorium’, which was in fact a large corrugated iron shed, built first in the grounds of Mill Hill School, where he taught, and then in his garden at 78 Banbury Road. He began working on ...”

“... as the mothers of children, but still with something of the look of a court ‘beauty’, as Sarah Churchill appears in John Closterman’s group portrait of the Marlborough family at Blenheim: an aristocratic lady with an authority that comes in part from her willingness to adopt something of the more responsible values of the middling class. Once the ...”

“... them – through steady toil. His second wife, the trying and triumphant Barbara Hare, is less grand than Isabel, but she has more common sense. Her devoted ordinariness is what fits her for marriage with the up-and-coming Carlyle. Isabel is doomed from the moment she enters the novel, gleaming with pearls and lace – ‘as one from a fairer world than ...”

“... the Parisian Renard had a wide sweep of artistic and political friendships, from Rodin and Sarah Bernhardt to Gide and Valéry to Jean Jaurès and Léon Blum. His politics were socialist and Dreyfusard; he also moved in the circle around the Revue blanche. The first three editions of Histoires naturelles were illustrated by Félix ...”

“... VOCs in most oils are benzene toluene, ethylbenzene and xylene.When I went out on the sea from Grand Isle, which is hardly more than a great sandbar at the end of the watery land south of the city, 109 miles from it by car, the taste was much stronger, and one of my companions on the boat had run into far worse. Drew Wheelan, a birdwatcher from the ...”

“... ingenuity and powered by Russian engines and other improvised innards. But on the Malecón, the grand boulevard along the Caribbean at the city’s northern edge, stands a row of other remnants from that era: battered off-white hulks like a mouthful of decayed, cigar-stained teeth. We recognise them from photographs taken in the 1950s, usually showing men ...”

“... in hardened clay, back from the planet you discovered but never had time to name.If Michael risks grand whines, Matthew risks producing regular-guy monologues, like any number of affable poets from America’s 1990s (Campbell McGrath, for example). Matthew aspires To walk barefoot on the cold stone and know that the woman you love is also walking barefoot on ...”

“... is richer in eccentricity and event than that of Harrison? Where Lowell can boast a Great Aunt Sarah thundering ‘on the keyboard of her dummy piano’ and ‘risen like the phoenix / from her bed of trouble-some snacks and Tauchnitz classics’, Harrison’s relations are more familiar figures, bickering on Blackpool’s Golden Mile or locked into their ...”

“... strange for so rarely seeing the light of day. In such little explored shadowy corners we find Sarah Wedgwood, the last surviving daughter of Josiah and Sally, living alone. Sarah was tall, thin, solemn and sad, but above all remarkably fastidious. She was so fastidious that she kept special pairs of gloves for ...”