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“... philanthropists and reformers – Cavell is there, and so are Queens Victoria and Alexandra, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Angela Burdett-Coutts. St Joan’s International Alliance, a Catholic body that was founded by suffragettes and is recognised today by both the Vatican and the UN, celebrated its centenary in 2011, and still distinguishes itself by ...”

“... might be. Eventually, and only after some considerable effort, almost a cross-examination, we drew from three of our colleagues the admission that they wanted the UK to leave the European Convention as soon as possible – which extinguished any possibility of real consensus. What is the point of an agreement, we wondered, that joins those who see a Bill ...”

“... the aim is ecstasy, the fantasy is death’ – but reprinted in book form, the parallels Sontag drew between the Nazi aesthetic and the physique of Nubian tribespeople seemed unpersuasive, leaned on, and the rhetoric overdone. ‘Fascinating Fascism’ formed a double feature in Saturn with ‘Syberberg’s Hitler’, Sontag’s heavy-lifting explication of ...”

“... together until the age of three, at which point they were adopted into different families. She drew the Passmores – Frederick was an ‘auto-mechanic teacher’, and Mary was a ‘homemaker and former secretary’ whose own mother had died when she was born. They renamed their daughter Marian. ‘The Passmores didn’t like to talk about ...”

“... Jolting miserably over the rough terrain, he began to wail. This – the thing I describe – drew a crowd. For his plight grew worse, yet his shouts were in a foreign language, desperately begging his ‘master’s mercy’. His funny way of talking made them laugh. His bodily contours, his fat suggested something alien, animal, Babylonian, gross. So the ...”

“... who had been billed to play the lead role of Julio but was too ill from jaundice to appear. What drew the crowds to Double Falsehood was the involvement (in a manner of speaking) of another, even bigger theatrical star, for it was Theobald’s remarkable claim, teasingly publicised over the previous months, that his play was based on a hitherto unknown work ...”

“... at a station in Cornwall. Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then, Standing as when I drew near to the town Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then, Even to the original air-blue gown! Hardy changed the last line from ‘Even to the original hat and gown’, which Tomalin calls ‘dull’, to the ‘original air-blue gown’, which ...”

“... his neck, kneeled in front of the young beauty this English soldier had brought back with him and drew the outline of her left foot and then her right on the paper he had asked her to stand on. She was 5’10”, very tall for an Italian, and had been nicknamed ‘the giraffe’ at home, where the much smaller local males found her height and thinness and ...”

“... in DIY self-pickling. Compared with Highsmith in her seventies, her fellow drunk-dyke genius Elizabeth Bishop looked like a fresh-blooming flower in her later years – a regular Goop-enhanced Gwyneth.Then there was the compulsive sexual promiscuity – a festival of glut, recrimination and endlessly renewed licentious squalor (I almost wrote ...”

“... comments to question the representativeness of her experience. They’d been taught the work of Elizabeth Anscombe and Philippa Foot in the 1980s! Could things be as bad as all that? ‘Probably not,’ someone called Brian replied.To suggest that a culture of sexism might be disproved by the presence of a few women who are granted exceptional status ...”

“... you can’t beat people who really believe in the traditional prescriptive stuff. Berger’s bleat drew a warm seconding letter from the reliably reactionary Elizabeth Jane Howard and her friend Sybille Bedford. If Berger had slyly blamed all the mayhem onto ‘the Rushdie affair’, these two went him one better in the ...”

“... Josephus, probably the only historian to have actually been in this physical sense a survivor, drew lots with his soldiers in a cave after the fall of the fortress he was commanding. They were to kill each other on this basis, but Josephus cooked the deal in such a way that he and one other man were left alive. ‘This is precisely what he brings the ...”

“... clayed cotton dress, and her arms and bare legs were sharp with metal down. The blenched hair drew her face tight to her skull as a tied mask; her features were baltic. The young man’s face was deeply shaded with soft short beard, and luminous with death. The impressive writing knows its impressiveness, but probably in this case was meant as caption ...”

“... irritating and so sent the equerry away in a bad temper. Reading more and more, the Queen now drew her books from various libraries, including some of her own, but for sentimental reasons and because she liked Mr Hutchings, she still occasionally made a trip down to the kitchen yard to patronise the travelling library. One Wednesday afternoon, though, it ...”

“... did not at the time commend itself to the prevailingly pious, who thought them scurrilous and drew biographical inferences from them. They did not confine themselves to the sexual infamies. Richardson added that ‘his brawls, his jarrs, his goals, his spunging-houses, are all drawn from what he has seen and known.’ Others added gaming, drinking and ...”