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“... story. He meets Shelley Bovey, the woman who runs the Fat Acceptance movement, and Dawn French and Helen Teague, who have a clothes range for big women (he interviews Teague; French refuses, her publicist saying she prefers to ‘concentrate on the label, rather than the issue of size’). He flies to New York to interview Robert Atkins a few weeks before ...”

“... confused and often unhappy. But she’s learned from her mother not to settle for anything small, and she sets out to invent her own life. The instinct that attracts her to glass is sure: she knows ‘that glass is a thing in disguise, an actor, is not solid at all, but a liquid, that an old sheet of glass will not only take on a royal and purplish ...”

“... Enrico Donati’s small painting White to White features an aggressively encrusted pale rectangle with a second rectangle – black, white and brown – in its top left corner. Dated 1953, fairly early for such deliberately coarse abstraction, the painting landed in the collection of the famously plain-spoken art critic Clement Greenberg ...”

“... patronage which drove the Modernist enterprise, and much of her life was consumed in fretting over small bills. Despite her troubles, she read and wrote to a rigorous schedule, and never touched a drink before 6 p.m. In 1921 she published ‘Speed the Plough’, a short story about a shell-shocked veteran of the Great War, and a minor masterpiece. Her first ...”

“... It’s just that this verdict is passed on The Miracle Worker (1962) of all films. When Helen Keller made her first communication with another human being, it wasn’t a lot like selling out a considered political position. What it was like was a painful birth, and Arthur Penn’s film doesn’t play down the pain of her entering into language. The ...”

“... with her appointments at the Maudsley. Miller was leaving, and she was treated by a doctor whose small talk about the world heavyweight championship was ‘remote from what I felt to be the centre of concern’. Things improved with the arrival of a new psychiatrist, Dr Cawley. He ‘had been a zoologist and mathematician’, ‘dressed as for a day in the ...”

“... with his poetry, that of Vermeer, and Vermeer’s paintings and interiors! One of the editors, Helen Deese, writes a highly perceptive essay on the relation of Lowell’s poetry to the visual arts, but she seems to take it for granted that the Vermeer analogy invoked, for example, in Lowell’s ‘Epilogue’ is a natural and normal one. It seems to me ...”

“... journalists get a raw deal. There is no entry on Katharine Whitehorn, Polly Toynbee, Nancy Spain, Helen Gurley Brown. Agony aunts get an even rawer deal: Marje Proops, Anne Landers and Dear Abby are firmly out. Pauline Réage is not given the benefit of the gender doubt. There is a noticeable favouritism towards the French experimental novel but indifference ...”

“... city housing projects designed to perpetuate the individual as a supposedly independent unit in a small hygienic dwelling make him all the more subservient to his adversary – the absolute power of capitalism.’ This was in essence a heavy-breathing version of the noir fix on Los Angeles which began in 1934 with James M. Cain’s The postman always rings ...”

“... have to sit amidst the silence listening to the snapping of threads.’ Dissidence plays a fairly small part in Klima’s preoccupations, which are more existential, both more private and more universal. The ‘threads’ to which he refers are those of the ‘net’ of relations which he, or his narrator, for ‘none of the characters in this book – and ...”

“... available from the social setting. A child of eleven or twelve was moved from family life in a small hovel to semi-institutional life in the great house of Mellerstain, an experience of new people, a new physical world, new tasks and a new level of discipline: no wonder flight home seemed attractive. Discipline, though, does not seem to have been very ...”

“... coffin all the way from the Transkei to the Pretoria police mortuary only to find that it was too small for the body to fit in. The inspector on duty saw the problem from a different angle: it was the body rather than the coffin that was causing the problem. He started to cut off the arms from the shoulders of the body, and the legs from the hip. The startled ...”

“... At first glance it seemed a very young and slender girl, dowdily dressed in black and wearing a small, close fitting black bonnet: she might have been a milliner’s assistant ... or a poorly paid governess hurrying to her pupils. As I drew near the pavement the girl looked up and I all but sat flat down in the road. For the first and only time in my life I ...”

“... actors are much like ourselves, only better-looking, with faster cars; people like Tom Hanks or Helen Hunt derive the major part of their appeal from what we might call their apparent ordinariness, and only occasionally, as with Jim Carrey or Robin Williams, does an actor come along who seems to have the superhuman plasticity of a cartoon. These movie ...”

“... government would turn first to workplace legislation. The aim would be reform in the interest of small business – boosting enterprise by making hiring and firing much simpler. Though long nurtured by the Howard Liberal Party, this policy had not been prominent in the campaign. Now, it looked like an illustration of Frankel’s thesis of the general slide ...”