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“... A few summers ago, I sat in on lectures at the Sorbonne, where it seemed to be the fashion for the lecturers to talk in metaphors. Beckett’s prose was a snowball rolling down a mountain: you start with nothing, and as it picks up more snow, you end up with something. His novels were a washing machine: language is slung into the drum and turns until it comes out clean ...”

“... Soon he began to think about having an affair. The wife of the dean, Ling Shuhua, whom he called Sue, seemed a candidate. ‘Fortunately she’s only reasonably nice-looking, so I’m not yet in love with her,’ he wrote to his mother. But she was so suitable: she was a writer and painter and, he told Vanessa, ‘really in our world’. He describes her ...”

“... Sue Lenier’s poems occupy 70 closely printed pages, of which I have read – the things I do for LRB! – 50 or so. If ‘read’ is the word for what one does, or can do, with language like this: Mourn no more for the flowers you have broken, Lies you have told and clouds stirred on my face Roused from my dark to the moons you have awoken, In this fair night your blackness keeps no place, When Winter holds her blue tongue to the trees Licking them white, they cry not at their death With tears like wings of flies washed in the breeze And blown away, each sad and lonely breath, And as each creature waits for Spring’s pale arms To rouse their sleep and tenderly lead them out, So I to you who did me all this harm Will wait, heart-full, to wake you with my shout  Of happiness, love and trembling sin –  As all the night goes out, the stars come in ...”

“... his death. ‘Something happened on the day he died,’ he sings in ‘Blackstar’. ‘His spirit rose a metre then stepped aside/Somebody else took his place.’ Or in ‘Dollar Days’: ‘If I’ll never see the English evergreens I’m running to/It’s nothing to me/It’s nothing to see/I’m dying to/Push their backs against the grain and fool them all ...”

“... up against.) Nor is Rosie having much fun in bed. She is distinctly lukewarm about her affair with Sue and is half-heartedly joining threesomes: partly ‘because the men found it fascinating’ and partly because ‘to refuse was as old-fashioned as refusing sex altogether.’ She does not seem to enjoy taking LSD either: it had ‘provided a non-stop joust ...”

“... alliance, Ethel Tobach and Betty Rosoff launched the series Genes and Gender; Ruth Hubbard, Mary Sue Henifer and Barbara Fried co-edited a collection called Women Look at Biology Looking at Women and Anne Fausto-Sterling explored society in biology as well as biology in society, before turning her attention to hormone research and the construction of sex and ...”

“... come to the boil. His face flushed, his back straightened, and his eyes widened. Then he rose to his feet, and finally he exploded. ‘If this article is published, young man I shall sue your newspaper for one hundred thousand pounds.’ A hundred thousand pounds seemed a lot of money in those days. Controlling my ...”

“... an early centralised heating system from the coal-fired furnace’. Mabel was ‘captivated’ by Sue, whom she entertained by playing the ‘beautiful new upright piano’ in the Dickinsons’ drawing room (she quickly earned a reputation as the finest musician in Amherst). She didn’t lose sleep over her decision to leave Millicent in Washington with her ...”

“... he grabbed you And held you helpless, or the Kray who stabbed you. The other big event is Poet Sue, A scribbling Cambridge undergraduette, Who as the French once went mad for Minou Is cried up as the greatest talent yet By dons who should have better things to do, You might think, than to stand there getting wet Drooling about the girl’s supreme facility ...”

“... her survivor. She has become his phantom limb. The story of Sylvia Plath, according to Jacqueline Rose, seems ‘effortlessly to transmute itself into soap opera’. As Rose demonstrates in her ambitious and original book, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, Plath has become one who ‘haunts our culture’, the ‘Marilyn Monroe ...”

“... with everything. The greenhouse was ethereal and too far away. A gnat ignited the harbour; it rose up gold and sloppy, with too many seals to think about. The basement was a dirigible. The Home Counties bristled at suggestions of voyeurism and venery: ‘Was it for this you came? To watch us writhe and cringe? Are you happy, knowing the palace janissaries ...”

“... in his own life between the working-class boy from Hebden Bridge and the glory to which he rose: ‘He spoke of his miner father coughing up his pneumoconiosis in the next bedroom to himself at home and of the 18 constituents who had died when their cage crashed in carnage to the bottom of Markham shaft the previous August. We were of an age and we ...”

“... Christine Brooke-Rose’s story of how this new book came to be is that she set out to write about her life, and instead produced a kind of antibiography. It’s described in the jacket’s blurb by Carcanet as ‘an autobiographical novel with a difference’ which ‘uses life material to compose a third-person fiction ...”

“... a great roaring sound. Those who delayed were drowned. In a matter of weeks the water level rose four hundred feet. Those who took part in the desperate diaspora fled westwards along the Danube valley, or southwards and eastwards at the foot of the Caucasus. Others crossed the wild terrain far to the east, eventually to find haven around a lake that ...”

“... nations, figureheads had a synecdochic function. They ‘embodied the spirit of the ship’, as Sue Prichard and Jeremy Mitchell write in their guide to the National Maritime Museum’s collection, representing by their design some quality or attribute for which their vessels were to be known.* The Egyptians carved figures of birds symbolising keen vision ...”