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“... a habit of dying in her arms. Myerson’s narrators are always women – Amy, Donna, Laura, Rosy, Susan, Tess – and usually they are women with children, caught up in domestic routines. Deaths apart, these are idealised portraits of middle-class family life. She is a novelist of scrubbed-pine kitchen tables, airing cupboards and French windows opening onto ...”

“... and an allowance. The children will, by custom, stay with him. In 2005, Dinner for Dickens by Susan Rossi-Wilcox and Lillian Nayder included a transcript of What Shall We Have for Dinner?, a slim collection of menus attributed to Catherine Dickens. For parties of eight to ten, try turbot, shrimp sauce, roast loin of mutton, pigeon pie, broccoli, mashed ...”

“... is the collection now housed in Amherst.) Dickinson, Bingham explains, wrote on backs of brown-paper bags or of discarded bills, programmes, and invitations; on tiny scraps of stationery pinned together; on leaves torn from old notebooks (one such sheet dated ‘1824’); on soiled and mildewed subscription blanks, or on department or drug-store ...”

“... art museums they designed (the list includes Gehry, Hollein, Nouvel, Stirling and Venturi-Scott Brown). ‘The two Swiss,’ Newhouse observed, ‘are convinced that artists have keener perceptive abilities than architects’ and, in consequence, have frequently worked with artists as advisers. She also commented on the importance of such Minimalist artists ...”

“... two teachers at the local secondary modern are disturbed by the behaviour of a pupil called Susan, and investigate. Susan turns out to be the granddaughter and travelling companion of a strange old man, known only as the Doctor – she was made a relative, it is said, because the writer was uncomfortable with the ...”

“... stupidity. If one puts that together with the unforgettable picture of Benn which emerges from Susan Crosland’s biography of Tony Crosland – Benn ringing up at all hours with phone pranks, practical jokes, impersonations and Goon Show voices – one realises that the common strand is a good-hearted boyishness. Far from being the sinister ogre of the ...”

“... sometimes logging the name of the particular hen who had laid it. She noted whether the eggs were brown or white or ‘brownish’ and any that were double-yolked. At the end of the week, she tallied up the total. She also made a note of hens that were broody and the ones that were moulting. When the very first hen laid its first egg, Young recorded the event ...”

“... general’s chair, feet on the desk, his head hidden behind a thick book. The book was wrapped in brown paper with a sticker on it that said: ‘SECRET. For MOD use only.’ ‘It’s all in here,’ he said as he put it down. It was the Penguin edition of Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. For a vast and often unreadable book, Black Lamb and Grey ...”

“... of her: ‘She was sitting in a corner, sulking and biting her lower lip – long blonde hair, brown eyes. Roman-striped skirt. As if it were a movie, she was glamorous and aloof. The girl I was talking to said: “That’s Bunny Lang. I’d like to give her a good slap.”’ If Lang’s truncated life ever was made into a movie, this scene might open ...”

“... if any of its best and brightest – Robin Cook, Douglas Alexander, Alistair Darling, Gordon Brown, even John Smith – had stayed in Scotland to lead the party and the devolved government at Holyrood? Only Donald Dewar took the train back north and became first minister of Scotland in 1999. It would be good to think that John Smith, who fought so hard ...”

“... and journalism – into auxiliary volunteer militias. Between them, Harry Evans and Tina Brown raised whole regiments of foot, horse and guns; flooding the bookstores and news-stands with the reassuring visage of the hero of Panama and Vietnam. Not to say an unfeeling thing, but if there were already any symptoms of palsy in the national ...”

“... group, now at the top of the New York avant-garde art world,’ Melvyn Bragg explains, blunt brown sideburns toning nicely with his blunt brown tie. A bit later he addresses Acker directly. ‘You talk in your books about doing away with meaning. What do you mean by that, more precisely?’ She smiles.For this ...”

“... of what the beautiful ought to be (but see Roger Scruton, below). To be sure, both Baudrillard and Susan Sontag have recommended something like a diet cure for images: that we try to be reasonable and reduce our intake, to fast once in a while perhaps, and exercise other senses. Yet this is pre-eminently an addictive society, and of all conceivable responses ...”

“... message on my Facebook Wall. Self-destructive thoughts when forced to admit they can’t. Like Susan Boyle, all one wants is to have one’s little life back. B., thank god, seems fine. Calls frequently from Cambridge on the Crackberry; thinks I’m making an insane fuss about moving five houses up the street. Full of kind spousal forbearance when I tell ...”

“... of the poet’s lost love: Miss Stacpoole. Yeats told John Quinn, in a letter quoted by Terence Brown in his foreword to the Selected Poems, that Mangan differed from the impersonal ballad writers of his time only ‘in being miserable’. Mangan’s relation to cultural nationalism is no longer as clear as it seemed in Newry. Joyce thought he was ‘little ...”