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“... who seemed to want to be a man and certainly behaved like one; and the wholesome but plain Jane Wyman, who, on account of the plainness and wholesomeness, could be relied on in the end to get her man, homespun values always winning out against brittle sophistication.The supreme exponent of brittle sophistication was Bette Davis, and for my aunties in ...”

“... be brought up in the Patriot din of Liberty and property and to be allow’d neither?’ Elizabeth Robinson inquired as a young woman. As Mrs Montagu, she would eventually acquire a considerable measure of both – but only after the death of the man by whose name she has since been known to posterity. None of the women Syliva Myers includes in the first ...”

“... was still legal. Among the pamphlets and essays Johnson published was an early poem by Mary Robinson –who later became famous as the actress Perdita, but was at this point in prison for debt – titled Elegiac Verses to a Young Lady, on the death of her brother who was slain at the late engagement at Boston....”

“... you best? In literature this sort of thing has a heartbreaking history, if one thinks of, say, Jane Welsh Carlyle, or Mrs Tennyson, or Vera Nabokov; but what if Pamela Stephenson, the clinical psychologist married to Billy Connolly, is the modern version? Here is a woman who never fails, in her ultra-bestselling biography Billy, to take advantage of her ...”

“... for an uplifting and uncontroversial symbol of Black accomplishment’ and Bunche – like Jackie Robinson, like Sidney Poitier – was fit for purpose. Bunche never stopped speaking for racial equality. Who is a better American, he asked in 1949, echoing Du Bois – ‘a better protector of the American heritage, of the American way, than he who demands the ...”

“... Meredith, Groucho Marx, Vincente Minnelli, Gregory Peck, Vincent Price, Robert Ryan, Edward G. Robinson, Donna Reed, Nicholas Ray, Robert Siodmak, Frank Sinatra, Sylvia Sidney, Claire Trevor, Franchot Tone, Walter Wanger, Keenan Wynn, William Wyler, Orson Welles, Billy Wilder, Jerry Wald and Robert Young. Ronald Reagan, a New Deal Democrat at the time (and ...”

“... machine with an impassable divide between rich and poor. (Among Briggs’s disciples was Jane Jacobs, who drew on his ideas to construct a theory of benign capitalism in The Economy of Cities, which has in turn influenced generations of neoliberals.) The essential idea is that Birmingham, as a city of hundreds of small trades rather than one great ...”

“... driveway under a full moon, it felt almost comically filmic, a strange technological distortion of Jane Austen’s novels, with character and power waiting to combust. The house loomed through the fog, as they say, and I texted Sarah to say I was two minutes away from the door. The kitchen was the usual thing: blue Aga, double sink, farmhouse table, plates ...”