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“... those extremely rare exchanges of dialogue that speckled my fiction, had I had recourse to the first person singular: in short, even when assuming the voice of one of my protagonists, I had never brought myself to say ‘I’ in print.) At any rate, they had enjoyed no commercial success whatever. Adair gives this magnificently preposterous high-modernist ...”

“... What has become of me could happen only in America,’ Ruth Bader Ginsburg said in her confirmation hearing before the United States Senate in 1993. She meant to praise America. The descendant of Jewish émigrés, she was about to become only the second female justice to join the US Supreme Court. But today the statement reads like an indictment: what became of her thirty years later could only happen in America too ...”

“... defiance (or defeat) and having children was not invariably a part of ‘having it all’. Ruth Brandon’s intelligent study, The New Women and the Old Men: Love, Sex and the Woman Question, focuses on a crucial stage in the politicisation of privacy, describing the personal involvements of social reformers in Britain between 1880 and 1914 as they ...”

“... of a lapse of judgment by their owner Harry Frazee in 1920, when he sold his star pitcher, Babe Ruth, to the New York Yankees for $150,000. Before they sold Ruth, the Red Sox were one of the most successful teams in professional baseball, having won five World Series to the Yankees’ none. But Frazee needed the money to ...”

“... In her very first stage appearance Doris Day wet herself. It was in her hometown of Cincinnati in 1927. She was five years old and not yet Doris Day. She was still Doris Kappelhoff and the red satin pants that her mother, Alma, had sewn for the kindergarten pageant were quick to betray her. It’s tempting to see this as a primal scene for Doris Day, the moment from which her longheld stage fright sprang ...”

“... The poet is not a poet in Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s new novel, and the dancer is not a dancer. ‘Although her movements were always the same – she waved her arms above her head, she ran now to the right of the room, now to the left – her audience obligingly saw what she wanted them to see. She was pleased, she ran faster, she attempted to spin round; her tread was not light, and she was flustered and breathing hard ...”

“... Our sounds the only bargains we may plead. So starts this solipsistic essay about words, Its first stanza chasing its own tail, Since no word will betray another word In this sodality, self-repressing and male, And we discover, hardly believing our eyes And ears, a sort of chromatic scale, That whatever lives and feels is logos. Tell us ...”

“... began training as a Froebel teacher in 1889, and proved very successful: six years later, her first book Brushwork, which outlined her methods of teaching watercolour painting, was brought out by her brother’s first publisher, Lawrence and Bullen. The sisters’ real achievement – and the one for which Joan Hardwick ...”

“... things a ballplayer must do – run, field, throw, hit, and hit for power – DiMaggio was the first man in history who was brilliant at five out of five.’ He struck out very rarely, almost unbelievably rarely for someone who swung hard enough to hit a lot of home runs. He was superb under pressure (a ‘clutch’ player), someone who would produce a hit ...”

“... Who could write world history without paying attention to Ricardo and Marx, both products of the first half-century of emancipation? For understandable reasons most writers on Jewish history, predominantly Jews themselves, tend to concentrate on the impact of the outside world on their people rather than the other way round. Even Peter Pulzer’s excellent ...”

“... outline of, unmistakably, the showman George M. Cohan spinning his cane, Paolo Garretto’s Babe Ruth as home run baseball floating in the air, unmistakably baseball and unmistakably Ruth. And Henry Major’s Ernst Lubitsch, Will Cotton’s Theodore Dreiser, Hirschfeld’s Bojangles Robinson, and more and more, all ...”

“... the uses and abuses of literacy and about the tremendous dislocations in British society after the First World War, which extended far beyond those who had suffered the direct trauma of battle. Hilliard uses these poison pen letters – written in language that was as eccentric as it was obscene – to ‘catch the accents of the past’. The Littlehampton ...”

“... Justice in London, 1967. Dr Miklos Yaron, a Hungarian gynaecologist, is suing his former assistant Ruth Kaplan for libel. Kaplan has published a pamphlet accusing Yaron of collaboration with Nazi leaders in 1944. As a member of the Central Jewish Council set up by the Nazis, Yaron had known that millions of Jews had already died in extermination ...”

“... to do with events in the immediate area around Sveavägen before, during and after the shooting. First, eye-witness reports have shown that more than thirty policemen were on the surrounding streets during the minutes before the murder happened. Several were on foot carrying walkie-talkies, others in police cars and vans, and when their reported positions ...”

“... whether or not to break it off. So he sought advice in a distinctively modern way: he wrote to Ruth English, agony aunt of Everybody’s, a weekly tabloid. Advice columns very quickly became common in British newspapers and magazines in the late 1930s. Though the concept of the agony aunt extended as far back as the 17th century, it took the launch of the ...”