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“... that would make today’s students weep. At North Carolina’s Goldsboro Female College in 1857, First-year students studied . . . arithmetic, English grammar and composition, US history, Latin, French, physiology and hygiene. The next year they progressed to algebra, natural history, ancient geography, universal history, natural philosophy, botany, and ...”

“... of 44, where I often came and went around drink time on a visit to one of Barbara’s friends, Ruth Tremain, who had taught maths to Army Air Corps pilots at Yale during the war. She was a strong chess player and we played often while I was writing a piece about Bobby Fischer. Because I had married Candace, on whom ...”

“... Grounds, ‘was the story he lived.’ But his afterlife has been uneven. Irving Stone was the first to tackle it, in Sailor on Horseback (1938), in which he more or less invented the evidence for London having killed himself with two vials of morphine. Subsequent biographers, even those who reject Stone’s theories, have been lurid in other ways. In Jack ...”

“... to it as if it were a child’, one particularly unsettled guest recalled. The jacket copy for her first book described her as ‘the only contemporary writer who is a practising amateur witch’, a characterisation she both encouraged and despised. But Jackson’s novels feature no monsters, no demons, no unambiguous manifestations of the supernatural. What ...”

“... and Milton (Gummo): Groucho was a middle child, if you want to make anything of it. He was the first to succeed, at the age of 15, with a vestigial talent for singing, but a miasma of rotten luck trailed his early efforts. When he went on the road with the Leroy Trio, Leroy fell hard for the second boy, a ‘buck-dancer’ named Johnny Morris, and the two ...”

“... and refused to admit it; she must not be allowed to corrupt American womanhood too. When the FBI first arrested Ethel’s brother, then Ethel’s husband, then Ethel, reporters kept failing to discover anything interesting about them. Among other poor Jews on New York’s Lower East Side, the whole family had appeared to be so unremarkable that the historian ...”

“... the sort of scorn and vitriol that French freethinkers once directed at the Roman Catholic Church. Ruth Harris’s book exemplifies the promise of this approach rather than its excesses. Pasteur appears only incidentally in its pages, yet he lurks behind them, for the book’s great theme is precisely the confrontation between modern, scientific, secular ...”

“... Scalia in 2016, aged 79. More recently, the court’s indefatigable liberal standard-bearer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, died in post aged 87, a mere six and a half weeks before the 2020 presidential election. Had Ginsburg lived four months longer, Joe Biden would have been able to nominate her successor; instead that privilege fell to Donald Trump. To avoid ...”

“... over the entire early modern period, without any dramatic turning-points or sharp discontinuities. Ruth Perry knows these things; she warns us not to confuse her argument with ‘the discredited thesis that the multi-generational, extended family gave way sometime in the 17th or 18th century to a nuclear family form’. She does maintain, however, that the ...”

“... of the most talked about films in the world. In Vienna alone, 71,000 people went to see it in the first two weeks (or so the publicity posters claimed). Mussolini asked for a private screening at his home in Rome, where he is supposed to have gasped at the beauty of the lead actress. ‘It shouldn’t be called Ecstasy,’ the Neue Zeitung complained, ‘it ...”

“... never was. Now what? ‘I love you for listening,’ Plath, abandoned and alone, tells her analyst Ruth Beuscher in a letter late in 1962. The rest of us are listening at last.The first letter is to Plath’s father, Otto. ‘I am coming home soon,’ she told him on a visit to her maternal grandparents in February 1940 ...”

“... went to a kiosk to call the police. The police found two more bodies stashed away behind the first one. All three women in the alcove, Kathleen Maloney, Rita Nelson and Hectorina Maclennan, were in their twenties. They had died between January and March. All of them had their heads covered with pieces of cloth and diapers between their legs.Ethel ...”

“... past would have fuelled them. Despite the fact that she recalled ‘making up’ stories from her first conscious moment, both her memoirs and her fiction represent the world of her childhood as pretty much impervious to the imagination. ‘In the well-regulated well-fed Summers world,’ her heroine recalls in The Reef (1912), ‘the unusual was regarded as ...”

“... moments in these novels. ‘Our tears are always young,’ he thinks, after a depressing visit to Ruth, who is now old (he no longer sees Ruth, but suspects she may have borne him a daughter). Or, feeling lost in space, as he sometimes does, he thinks of ‘what souls must feel when they awaken in a baby’s body so far ...”

“... But the New Yorker advertising department was far from his only target. ‘L’Lapse’, his first piece for the magazine, is a pastiche of the stylised dialogue of Antonioni’s hit movie L’Eclisse, but the joke is less on the filmmaker than on the reviewers, and their strenuous efforts to make sense of it. The protagonists are critics as well as ...”