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“... work from dawn till dusk for the public weal – but without the tools men had to hand. Why? Julia Bush’s earnest new book only partly answers this question. The anti-suffragists, she tells us, were much like their suffragist opponents: serious, high-minded, committed to a range of worthy causes, often possessed of advanced views about the need ...”

“... closest friend was Susan Sontag. Still, no publisher wanted Taubes’s first novella, A Lament for Julia, and when her novel, Divorcing, was published in the US in 1969, it was panned by Hugh Kenner in the New York Times as the work of a ‘lady novelist’. A few days later, at the age of 41, she walked into the sea in the Hamptons. Sontag identified the ...”

“... parked carsinto the forensic flash, flash of cameras.Around her, the Pre-Raphaelite beautiesof Julia Margaret Cameron,the mongols of Arbus.Track east to the Caltonwhere Nelson’s upturned telescopestands staring at the ground,where the observatory lies empty, closeda century ago by railway smokefrom Waverley: the Enlightenment below.Gulls mill like ash ...”

“... body, which is the primary site of ‘the abject’ as well, a liminal category defined by Julia Kristeva as neither subject nor object and thus charged with intense ambivalence. Sherman evokes this extreme state in scenes suffused with signifiers of menstrual blood and sexual discharge, vomit and shit. The domain of her so-called civil war and sex ...”

“... of presidents like Ronald Reagan and – not that anyone wants to remember this now – George W. Bush inheriting the mantle of Winston Churchill. Robert Conquest, presenting a relatively sophisticated, unmilitaristic and tolerant version of the Anglosphere (it included Nigeria and India) in Reflections on a Ravaged Century contrasted ‘the European ...”

“... there was nothing mere about food, that food was never merely fuel, was lesson number one. For Julia Child, the epiphany was a simple sole meunière in postwar Rouen: ‘I closed my eyes and inhaled the rising perfume … I chewed slowly and swallowed. It was a morsel of perfection.’ Julia wasn’t the first American ...”

“... gleaming on its flanks. A sperm whale! In Oban Bay! Having surfaced it sent up a satisfying bush of spray two or three times. I couldn’t contain myself. ‘Look!’ I said to the woman next to me. ‘Look! There’s that whale!’ But she didn’t look. She just turned away, saying: ‘I am not a whale watcher, thank you.’ The world is full of ...”

“... and lost, bad men and bad women. Kemp’s granddaughter, for instance, the beautiful, headstrong Julia Sorrell, would make a brilliant heroine. She burst into tears at her wedding, and some years later stood throwing rocks at the stained glass windows of a church, while inside her husband converted to Catholicism. Her only belief, which she clung to with ...”

“... legtimates attempts to pierce that secrecy. Pincher has been going round and round this mulberry bush for forty years now, with considerable commercial success. Pincher’s latest offering is at least as awful as the rest. As a literary construction it is a mess, rambling endlessly and repetitively around the same warmed-over material which he has already ...”

“... of a political hot potato: most of these drafts were being written in the years of the George W. Bush tax cuts. ‘There’s something very interesting about civics and selfishness, and we get to ride the crest of it. Here in the US, we expect government and law to be our conscience. Our superego, you could say … Americans are in a way crazy. We ...”

“... within this overmastering Totality, an end-time so final that all detours appear futile. President Bush’s descent on Iraq is just one of these: not an aberration or a relapse into old-fashioned imperialism, but characteristic of the new age. That is, of a globe that has become truly One, though still awaiting the signal-flares of true redemption. And in ...”