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“... were both applauded and judged harshly when she was alive. Now, forty years after her death, they are the subject of increasing critical interest. In her lifetime she was praised by H.L. Mencken, Sinclair Lewis, Louise Bogan, but Edmund Wilson said that One of Ours,* her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, was a complete failure and that My Antonia ...”

“... would look dreary and unstylishly old hat. In this book, James Whorton makes it clear that dealing death by poison was not, after all, exclusively suburban, although, apart from later industrial disasters, it does seem to have been almost entirely domesticated. The poison in Whorton’s book is specifically arsenic, and the deaths were only sometimes the ...”

“... described the work in his memoir, A Forger’s Life (2009), written with his daughter Sarah: ‘I dreaded the technical error, the small mistake, the tiny detail that could have escaped me. The slightest second of inattention can prove fatal, and on each piece of paper depends the life or death of a human ...”

“... of the Avant-Garde , dealing with the history of the New York art world from 1940 to 1985, Sarah Crane reflects on the differences between success in the literary marketplace and success for the visual artist. Because novels sell at a much lower price than paintings or other artworks, the market for literature is much greater and commercial success ...”

“... gruesomely named ‘Swann’s Songs’ is discovered years later by a young feminist scholar, Sarah Maloney, and Swann’s reputation begins to grow. Scheming academics, obsessive literary biographers, unreliable or downright devious relatives, neighbours and acquaintances of the dead woman, combine to clarify (or is it obscure?) the circumstances of her ...”

“... earlier part of the narrator’s life.It’s a daunting move, opening a collection with a pet’s death – ‘I’d always known I’d have to live without her someday; I just hadn’t known it would be tomorrow’ – but it only gets grimmer, in a euphoric way, from there. The narrator who presides over most of the book is rueful, plaintive, with a ...”

“... It’s one of the few pavilions to have remained unchanged. The only advantage given to it by Sarah Lucas, so insightful in interview, so frustrating in practice, is the marigold yellow interiors (she calls them ‘deep cream’) which set off the pale terracotta façade nicely. Inside the plaster casts of her female friends’ lower halves – some ...”

“... against a vast, inhospitable landscape; one aberrance in the form of a Hollywood thriller starring Sarah Michelle Gellar; and Senna (2010), a documentary about the Formula One driver pieced together from 15,000 hours of archival footage. As Kapadia told the New York Times, there are few people about whom you could make a film like Senna, because he was so ...”

“... feed, wash, soothe and scold an infant, and something like a history of mothering comes into view. Sarah Knott privileges anecdote in her account of mothering in Britain and North America over the past four centuries, partly because she wants to think about subjectivity and experience, but also because anecdote implies interruption, distraction and ...”

“... British stage since the mid-18th century; but despite a lineage that included her aunt, Sarah Siddons, her father, Charles, and her uncle, the great tragedian John Philip Kemble, Fanny herself was deeply ambivalent towards the theatre. She first aspired to be a writer rather than an actress; and it was only when the family faced bankruptcy that the ...”

“... oil’. The miserable effort needed to transport it across the trackless bush causes more than one death. Carey, like his two main characters, is a gambler: he has a bet on with the reader. He lays his plots in exuberantly meticulous detail, each segment carefully slotted into its proper place in the slowly emerging pattern, until we’re led to that ...”

“... identified as the tragedian Elisa Rachel, whom Charlotte Brontë had seen in London in 1851. Sarah Bernhardt may be better known today, but it was Rachel who haunted the English literary imagination throughout the 19th century. In James’s The Tragic Muse, the Jewish Cockney actress Miriam Rooth claims to be in the same style as ‘that woman’, and ...”

“... narrative rhythms. Fictional climax is denoted by an opening of flesh, a skinning, or a horrible death. When stuck for Marlowe’s next move Chandler, famously, would have someone come through the door toting a gun. Benedict drops bodies out of the sky. It rains dogs, pigs, rabbits, cows and in one instance people. In ‘Rescuing Moon’ Grady goes to spring ...”

“... the Parisian Renard had a wide sweep of artistic and political friendships, from Rodin and Sarah Bernhardt to Gide and Valéry to Jean Jaurès and Léon Blum. His politics were socialist and Dreyfusard; he also moved in the circle around the Revue blanche. The first three editions of Histoires naturelles were illustrated by Félix ...”

“... Sarah Hrdy is tough-minded about a tender subject. Motherhood, she says, is a minefield. Mothers love babies passionately – but not unconditionally. We have evolved as adept sociobiologists, able to calculate love. On the other side of the relationship, baby love is unconditional, indeed desperate. Babies want it all, every scrap of attention they can command, at least up to the point where the mother would be so exhausted that her failure would rebound on the baby itself ...”