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“... But what exactly had she miscarried? It may have been a malformed placenta or foetus, or, as Karen Harvey suggests, a teratoma – a tumour containing bones, tissues, hair, teeth and flesh that can develop anywhere in the body.Whatever came out of Mary Toft after that long day in the fields, it seems to have prompted her mother-in-law, Ann, a ...”

“... She wants to be special and she wants to be looked at. In Hans Christian Andersen’s famous tale, Karen, a peasant girl, goes barefoot in summer and in winter wears wooden clogs that rub her feet raw, but the mirror tells her she’s lovely and she thinks that wearing the red shoes will make her feel like a princess. Like selfish Heidi and tomboy Katy, ...”

“... novel James Joyce might have written if he had moved to Iowa City and lived to be 100’.) Lee Harvey Oswald, who could easily have been made into a – yawn – ‘cypher’, is persuasively sketched as a man desperately wishing to merge himself into history, into ‘the struggle, where there is no borderline between one’s own happiness, and the world ...”

“... in 1959. So nice indeed was his home that when he heard rough boys shouting, ‘Show us your quim, Karen,’ and asked his mother what a quim was, she replied: ‘Your little toe, I think.’ He took to theatricals in school and soon had disreputable and bohemian friends. It has to be said that Rupert’s ghost-writer does a very good job of describing London ...”

“... In an entirely other kind of brilliant, frantic, wide-ranging book, the theologian and ex-nun Karen Armstrong’s spiritual autobiography The Spiral Staircase (2004), we are reminded that ‘the myths of the hero … are not meant to give us historical information about Prometheus or Achilles, or for that matter about Jesus or the Buddha’ – or, we ...”