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“... an uncommon smoothness, but you never get, say, the sinuosity of Marilynne Robinson or the snap of Mary McCarthy. The stories are always filled out, where an elliptical strategy might have proved useful to a writer churning over material she’s used before, as in the case of Lydia Davis. I started to think of reading ...”

“... following in the footsteps of Norman Douglas and accompanied by her admirer and mentor Irving Davis. When Davis’s stepdaughter joined them she objected to the children’s presence and so unworried was Gray about them that she gave them £20 and told them to hitchhike back to London. It took them three weeks and when ...”

“... worry as much as oral historians do about how to interpret what they’re told – and as Natalie Davis noted in a review of Montaillou, Ladurie’s key witnesses were nothing if not fine conteurs. There’s a world of difference between the modern informant in the village and the medieval suspect under interrogation in the inquisitor’s court. Much of the ...”

“... her friends, many of them mutual friends of whose discomfiture she was oblivious. To Rupert Hart-Davis she wrote that Cecil and his wife were ‘like two wheels of a bicycle propelling the stark frame of their life together, never meeting’. It is a good image. Hastings, who is a sympathetic but not an indulgent biographer, knows when to introduce ...”

“... the end of the decade, the answer proposed by Gone with the Wind had been imbibed by a generation.Mary Flannery O’Connor hadn’t heard of Faulkner until she was in her twenties and a student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (around this time she dropped ‘Mary’ from her name, to avoid sounding like ‘an Irish ...”

“... out of the house and stashed them in the hills’. He was so sure that his younger sister, Mary, was the mother of God that he would prostrate himself before her, which she found unbearable. (She changed her name to Lindsay.) They grew up frightened of showing anger or strong emotions: they didn’t want to be put on psychiatric drugs too. To get out ...”

“... always so. In early modern Britain, animals were tried along with humans for bestiality. In 1677, Mary Hicks, a married working-class woman, was brought before London’s Central Criminal Court on the charge of having sex with her dog. The dog was brought into court and ‘set on the Bar before the prisoner’. He immediately started ‘wagging his tail, and ...”

“... imply the presence of at least one other character too. Take this sixty-word wonder by Lydia Davis (it’s called ‘The Outing’):An outburst of anger near the road, a refusal to speak on the path, a silence in the pine woods, a silence across the old railroad bridge, an attempt to be friendly in the water, a refusal to end the argument on the flat ...”

“... and scores of his cat postcards, cartoons and children’s books can still be found. Like Degas or Mary Cassatt, Wain could draw a perfectly normal-looking cat when he wanted to – at least for a while. But over time the anthropomorphised expressions become more and more intense, bug-eyed and oddly sinister (notably when the feline subject is shown ...”

“... and publicly she was clearly a monstre sacré almost indistinguishable from any other (Bette Davis, for example), a person entirely different from the unworldly, dedicated creator and pure fount of originality she had been during the first half of this century. In those days she had exemplified the difficulty of telling the dancer from the dance as ...”

“... Kötting’s felt helmet, gives him the aspect of an assistant executioner waiting for a crack at Mary Queen of Scots. All the marchers had authentic Europhile connections and antecedents. The Anglo-German Kötting made films in France and escaped whenever he could to a primitive forest house beside an old Cathar track in the Pyrenees. Barton came to Hastings ...”

“... was the embodiment of the revolutionary democracy we had not yet learned how to imagine,’ Angela Davis observed. ‘My people need inspiration,’ Simone said. In the spectacle she made of herself as well as in her voice – ‘I want people to know who I am,’ she said – Simone became a race champion. In the mid-1960s Vernon Jordan, the head of the Urban ...”

“... the closest model for a belletrist sans merci was the critic, novelist, and wickedest of wits Mary McCarthy, who told Susan she smiled too much, the telltale mark of a provincial. McCarthy was also reputed to have said to Sontag, ‘I hear you’re the new me,’ and, to others, ‘She’s the imitation me,’ digs that made their way round the cocktail ...”

“... a lecture delivered on Irish radio in 1995 and published in The Great Irish Famine: The Thomas Davis Lecture Series, James Donnelly remarked thatthroughout the rest of the Famine years, the Gregory clause or ‘Gregoryism’ became a byword for the worst miseries of the disaster – eviction, exile, disease and death. When in 1874 Canon John ...”

“... cells. A major disappearance is the railway bridge that once carried, along with promos for George Davis and Reggie Kray, passengers from Dalston Junction to Broad Street: a lovely aerial view of industry, canal, domestic and commercial property, Shoreditch to City. You saw, precisely, where you were. For a token fee (often no fee), you became a privileged ...”