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“... I find​ it hard to believe that Harper Lee was actually in favour of publishing Go Set a Watchman, a rejected manuscript that lay among her papers for more than fifty years. Yet the book is now here and doing exactly the kind of damage that its wily author always felt it would. For a novelist, it’s one thing not to destroy a book and another thing to publish it, and the work they are calling the ‘publishing sensation of the year’ is merely a pre-hash of something that came to be known for its polished good nature ...”

“... other people’s memory of the past, at which she had spent her life peering in wonder like a child at a magic lantern show. Ah, but there is my own life to come yet, she thought, my own life now and beyond. In the next ‘Miranda’ story, set in 1918 during the flu epidemic (in which Porter herself nearly died), home still haunts her dreams: ‘Too ...”

“... complete run of The Fantastic Four, the famous 102 issues drawn by Jack Kirby and scripted by Stan Lee, a defining artefact (I now know) of the Silver Age of comics.Luke was precocious, worldly, full of a satirical brilliance I didn’t always understand but pretended to, as I pretended to understand his frequent references to ‘Aunt Petunia’ and ‘The ...”

“... carried warnings, admonitions or silent appeals for justice. Violet Paget, who wrote as Vernon Lee, learned from this body of writing, and from Gaskell especially. But the moral drive of High Victorian literature was alien to her, and she confounded the expectations that had formed around supernatural fiction written by women. Spiritual guidance is rare in ...”

“... her resistance to desire for or friendship with women; Pip in Great Expectations is the feminised child or doll in the cruel triad of Estella/Pip/Miss Havisham; and Trollope (punitively described as complacent, conservative and antifeminist) is seen to make an exception to his general attitude, under the influence of his feminist friend Kate Field, in Can You ...”

“... up to Albert Anastasia’s enormous Spanish Mission-style home. The Palisades section of Fort Lee, New Jersey, then as now, was a sleepy, leafy enclave, overlooking the Upper West Side, a mile or so across the Hudson. My mother came out the front door of our house, walked up to me, knelt down, and said: ‘Augie, Gloriana’s daddy got very, very ...”

“... Lee Miller invented her first name as if to veil her femaleness when she was a society beauty and fashion model in the 1920s. It went along with a new shift in the style of sexual excitement, a new pleasure in androgyny: what Carolyn Burke discreetly calls ‘a redistribution of sexual energies’.Later, her neutral first name helped to advance her short New York career as a professional portrait photographer, before women were wholly welcome in the field; and much later, long after she had distinguished herself as a French Surrealist icon and a British war correspondent, her name could sometimes be confused with Lee Friedlander’s, even though he was a very different artist with a long-term, stable fame ...”

“... acquaintances remember a trusty William Morris carrier, and she took a spongebag, Hermione Lee reports, to the Booker dinner. In her letters she uses the dotty-lady schtick for two main purposes. It’s there to entertain and mollify her daughters, on whom she depended for all sorts of things: ‘Marina Warner came to lecture at the Highgate Institute ...”

“... young Demon half-recognises the affinity himself.Kingsolver has transposed Dickens’s story to Lee County, Virginia in the 1990s. It’s a real place: the westernmost part of the state, with an economy dependent on the declining industries of coal and tobacco. The area is poor and predominantly white, and the novel implicitly offers a prehistory of why ...”

“... Rosie Lee Tompkins​ , born Effie Mae Martin in Gould, Arkansas in 1936, grew up picking cotton alongside her fourteen siblings and half-siblings. As was common for a child of rural sharecroppers, her formal schooling was limited, but Tompkins learned to sew by making bedcoverings with her mother, scrapping together any available pieces of cloth ...”

“... and feared and needed the approval of her snobbish, dull, shrieking and ambitious mother Janet Lee Bouvier as much as Maisie loathed and feared and needed her mother; she flirted with her father, who drank and spent money and flirted in turn with anyone who came his way. Her parents made no secret of their disastrous marriage and the great gap between her ...”

“... usual anything but slow on the uptake, knew they might tell us something we needed to know about Lee Harvey Oswald, perhaps the most mysterious and most tragic American figure in the age of Schiller. If the gods of reason were attentive, it would make sense for him to be reunited with his sparring partner and sometime mate, Norman Mailer. Surely, if he was ...”

“... she was a resident of a small village, peaceably married, and had given birth to her second child a month before. She was still housebound, according to custom, but had seemed healthy that day to those who were with her: her sister, her husband and a friend. Thus, a visit she received, though not unusual, later came to seem significant. Towards ...”

“... private in-state college with ambitions of becoming a playwright. She sleeps with and then marries Lee, a poetry professor. The main thing Peggy and Lee have in common is that they are gay, which doesn’t make for a terrific marriage. But at least Lee can enjoy the benefits that accrue to ...”

“... she set her 17th-century novel: Shadows on the Rock rather sentimentally describes, through a child protagonist, the gracious, admired culture of the past. Now in her sixties, Cather was monumental in character and achievement, rocklike to many, stern, undoubting, assured, severe and undemocratic. To some – especially to those she patronised – she ...”