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“... a ubiquitous presence on the Holocaust ‘circuit’.In A Nation on Trial, a book written with Ruth Bettina Birn, I sought to expose the shoddiness of Goldhagen’s book. Birn, an authority on the archives Goldhagen consulted, first published her critical findings in Cambridge University’s Historical Journal. Refusing ...”

“... and later he married a girl I’d taught at another time, and I understand that I was their first shared passion.’ Imagine it: erotic unification over this man, someone who hated music in public places, fascists and Bolshevists, the feel of satin; who was dolphin-like in his movements, an obsessive self-googler before easy engines existed, who could ...”

“... nightingale is a thing of art and myth, an immortal whose song found out ‘the sad heart of Ruth’; but it is also a transient visitor to a Hampstead garden, which heedlessly slips out of earshot (‘Past the near meadows, over the still stream,/Up the hill-side’) and so brings Keats’s poem to an unpremeditated close. Carver’s poem sets about ...”

“... with the rubber tyre that was suspended from their ceiling.Hackenfeller’s Ape was Brophy’s first novel, published in 1953 when she was 23. In a preface written almost forty years later, she describes the flat she shared at the time with her friend Sally, close enough to the zoo to hear the lions roar. The novel tells the story of four days in the life ...”

“... the sense of lack of ‘ownership’ of the Human Rights Act was neither widespread nor deep. Our first public consultation confirmed this: the responses were broadly supportive of the status quo, with the caveat that most people wanted more rights for more people, not fewer rights for fewer people. Concerned that the results might be misleading, the ...”

“... for social conditioning over biological destiny. Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, which had also first appeared long before I read it, was decisive as well, though her vivid way with physical evocation was less encouraging than Malinowski and Mead’s utopian picture of possible liberty. Beauvoir’s grim plain-speaking put bodies – gynaecology and ...”

“... anxieties, projections, phantasmagoria – things to which women are particularly prone. In the first week of 2013 I started to count, in an idling way, the number of books by women reviewed in the weekly arts pages of the Irish Times and found none. They were all by men. There was a short interview with a woman, Mary Costello, a writer whose sentences are ...”

“... previous life, it allowed her to have sex with the Director of the Institute on his desk, after first clearing away the more fragile maps and genealogies that covered it. Alone and unobserved on the island, she is given a bit more slack: it’s enough that she is free to walk outside to visit her charge, bring it its ration of kibble, look it full in the ...”

“... the celebrity, wealth and critical admiration she earned over a long and charmed career – her first suspense novel, Strangers on a Train (1950), published when she was 29, was an immediate bestseller, and she rolled on from there – her life looks from one angle like the most horrible botch: a concatenation of private misery and psychic turmoil for ...”

“... Year’s Eve won’t be until 2028 so it’s the last one I shall ever see – and it’s also the first that I ever knew about. The moon is strong enough to cast sharp shadows, with the sky blue except for occasional reefs of cloud so that with the snow still lying in drifts on the road earth and heaven seem one. 23 January. To the National where I watch the ...”

“... she took with her, when he was two, to London from Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) along with her first finished manuscript, The Grass Is Singing. The two packages are always mentioned together. The manuscript was in the suitcase she carried, they say. The child is always noted, but in these mini-biographies or profiles, left to tag along. Did Peter hold ...”

“... one don was said to wear a black armband on the anniversary of the day in 1978 when women were first admitted to the college.)Behind nearly every woman philosopher in the period before the widespread admission of women to academic institutions was a man willing to provide access to an education otherwise denied. In many cases this was her father: we might ...”

“... Newell, who wanted Rupert to do a bit of work for the role of David Blakely, the guy killed by Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in England. Newell wanted to see Rupert’s pain. But, as Rupert himself admits, he was ‘a riddle as an actor. On screen, I had a lot of “feeling” but I couldn’t really act. On stage I could act, but people said I ...”

“... unheard of, would take some figuring out. The emotional generosity and sense of adventure that had first drawn them together would – just about – see them through an enduring creative and domestic partnership extraordinary by any standards. And yet there’s a warning note in that apparent complicity, however playful, with Faithfull’s emphasis on what ...”

“... gushed about it to his long-suffering fiancée, Martha Bernays: How that Sarah plays! After the first words of her lovely, vibrant voice I felt I had known her for years. Nothing she could have said would have surprised me; I believed at once everything she said … I have never seen a more comical figure than Sarah in the second act, where she appears in a ...”