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“... own words that her models were the divas of opera and theatre, or the great dancers of ballet: Sarah Bernhardt, Eleonora Duse et al (silent movies are much closer to ballet and grand theatre than they are to Breaking Bad). Both Bernhardt and Duse offered the young Negri the same melancholy advice: one could choose perfection of the life or perfection of ...”

“... the story with the recent work of Colin Matthew, Roy Jenkins, Richard Shannon, John Vincent, Sarah Bradford and Stanley Weintraub. Essentially it’s dry-bones parliamentary history – elections, cabinets, reshuffles, bills, budgets, divisions, dissolutions – and its verdict on the falling out hardly deepens our understanding: ‘By the end of ...”

“... early fire went out of the literary affair, into affectionate long-distance phone calls. Then, the death of one party, and a shared afterlife of warring biographies, resurrected backlists, found fragments (better left to obscurity), impertinent television documentaries, and the smothering embrace of reluctant academic acknowledgment. The conjunction of ...”

“... enacted what we have long been accustomed to think of as a romantic programme, whereby love and death converge, and dying young is the thing to do, whereby other people, and common life, are a thing to be escaped from, and a tension develops between the duty to a partner and a cultivation of the self, between the dictates of an amour fou and an amour de ...”

“... marriage certificates with an X. In my own time, because of what’s happened, because of the death of the big industries, we’ve been given to singing a kind of hymn to Glasgow’s industrial might. And you’d need a heart like a swinging brick to sneer at the magnificence of those ships and those engines, or to deny the human effort they embodied. But ...”

“... diverse in talent and sensibility as Rebecca Brown, Dennis Cooper, Kathy Acker, Gary Indiana and Sarah Schulman, writers whose main similarity seemed to be that they all started out at small presses before being ‘discovered’ by big houses.By now – by which I mean, in the most Nixonian sense of the phrase, at this point in time – the formation and ...”

“... values and sexual difference are necessarily in harmony. A dissenting view (argued in Sarah Schulman’s The Ties that Bind) is that the family, irrespective of class, is where sexual minorities learn about their worth, or lack of it. Some families manage a welcome (the writer Tom Wakefield, son of a Staffordshire coal miner, often talked about ...”

“... off to Constantinople on a steamer – the kind of modern vessel he opposed till the day of his death several decades later.The painter, David Wilkie, had been prescribed foreign travel by his doctor, as a remedy for what sounds like depression. He was a Scotsman who’d risen from poverty and, in the early part of the century, became a great favourite of ...”

“... Rossa were aware of Alfred Nobel’s dynamite compound, invented in 1867. ‘Dynamite,’ as Sarah Cole wrote in her book At the Violet Hour (2012),held highly idealised associations. It offered new vistas of power, not solely for its potential to wreak destruction but also for its ability to terrify a wide public. The connotations of dynamite for ...”

“... Apartheid’s Chief Killer (2003), a book of interviews with Eugene de Kock, the apartheid death squad leader who was called ‘Prime Evil’ by his own men. The day after she first shook his hand, she woke up to find that she could not lift her right forearm, which had gone completely numb, ‘as if my body were rejecting a foreign organ ...”

“... or longing: in his mother’s lifetime James used to call a gay chatline, realising only after her death that since she paid the premium charges on the phone bill she must have known what he was doing, while Mungo availed himself of Ha-Ha’s pornography, once guiltily ironing the pages to smooth out the creases made when he folded female anatomies out of ...”

“... Just that – all in a rush, all in a preternaturally silly little voice. Instant self-imposed death sentence: one’s inner Devil Girl (fangs filed down, claws tucked away) has suddenly gone dopey and shy. SORRYMYHANDISSOCOLD! – indeed. Good luck with that. It’s true: my hands have become mottled blue-grey ice clumps during the long wait. More than 90 ...”

“... into the details of what happened next. This privilege has been embraced by others, among them, Sarah Bradford in America’s Queen (2000): ‘They would have sex in all sorts of unconventional places, aeroplanes, small boats, the beach, regardless of who might be watching or photographing. The brother of one of Jackie’s Washington friends was shocked by ...”

“... spires and towers. At about 2.6 million the population was still in recovery from the Black Death and half what it had been in 1300, but there was a general air of prosperity. London, always an exception, was densely packed with houses whose jutting upper stories made the most of tight plots at ground level; the streets were labyrinthine and public ...”

“... one mystery: the world. Psychology is concerned with false mysteries. No one can say whether the death of my mother had an influence or not.’ And of his favourite motifs he insisted: ‘They are objects (grelots, skies, trees etc) and not “symbols”.’Magritte made exceptions to this rule, though. A hot-air balloon that once crashed near his home and a ...”