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“... That was the required term. It had happened in late September on the floor of the living room of Linda’s cramped terraced house in Carshalton, with her mother asleep upstairs. On a trip to Switzerland I had bought her a very cheap blouse which I persuaded her to try on, thus inducing her to remove the one she was wearing. One thing led to another. I ...”

“... Linda Wagner-Martin, a highly respected scholar of American literature who teaches at the University of North Carolina, was bewildered by the hostile reception in Britain of her biography of Sylvia Plath, published in 1987. Not only had she run into major conflicts with the Plath estate, she explains in her preface to Telling Women’s Lives, but some critics saw her as both an ‘unethical commercial writer’ and a radical feminist ...”

“... often had more power in filling these positions than has the President himself. Bush went for a black candidate in part because the vacancy had been created by the retirement of the Supreme Court’s only black judge, the highly distinguished Thurgood Marshall. And he went for Thomas, of course, because he was a ...”

“... develop legal and other sanctions against pornography – including having helped Deep Throat star Linda Boreman (Linda Lovelace was a nom de porn) reveal the often coercive and violent underside of the industry. Indeed, so prominent is MacKinnon as an anti-pornography activist and sometime adviser to ...”

“... in his own country were now walking openly ‘along the streets, hanging upon the arms of nasty black men’. Cobbett’s attitudes towards women and sex – like his racism – have usually been decently marginalised, yet they are part of why he urgently needs reappraising. We don’t have to know that his relationship with his wife was unhappy: there were ...”

“... carefully composed exploration of Sheridan’s career’. His biography comes hard on the heels of Linda Kelly’s, and it would be comforting to report that O’Toole’s was the rehash, but the Granta puff has it the right way round, while Alan Chedzoy’s life of the first Mrs Sheridan (the noted soprano and beauty Elizabeth Linley) is more boisterously ...”

“... the Countess of Polwarth are probably responsible for her daughter’s insistence, reproduced by Linda Pollock in her anthology of comments on family life, on a daily dose of arithmetic for her nine-year-old daughter. Women, even of the upper class, and even though aided by servants, were expected to carry out a wide range of manual domestic tasks. From ...”

“... of the skin and laid it flat across the flesh – and then within all a sluggish corner drop of black or purple oil. Typing that out makes one see and feel the tailness of a peacock’s tail as never before, but the metaphors – flesh, green wetness – unlike those in a comparable poem, retain their secret involuntariness. As in the best diaries, there ...”

“... some mutilated cattle. The CIA know all about boys’ aliens, the radar blips and the pilot’s black box, because boys can not only verify their aliens scientifically, they also conspire to cover this scientific proof up. Hence the 1947 Roswell Incident, the subject of the Channel 4 programme, in which the Air Force covered up the fact that real ...”

“... that when it was destroyed by bombs during the Second World War she was ‘rather pleased’. Linda Lear suggests, plausibly, that the grimness of Potter’s childhood was exaggerated by her earlier biographers. Certainly it was materially comfortable but it was strikingly austere. The older Potters were affectionate in their way but their social ...”

“... ago, partly out of gratitude. I had just started watching birds, I was terrible at it, and the big black creatures – two and a half feet tall, with a wingspan of more than four feet – were easy to find, even in my field guide. Unlike the variegated wood warblers flitting from page to page deep inside the book, the cormorants lived at the front with the ...”

“... Untitled Film Stills, Fini poses melodramatically in the shadowy recesses of a bed with her black-stockinged legs prominently on display; in another, she emerges confrontationally from a curtain, displaying her breasts, with a black cat between her legs; and in a third, she lies on the floor surrounded by strewn ...”

“... denials while talking on the telephone two separate personalities were brought into being: that of Linda and that of Tone. Tone, of course, was short for Tony, who originally acquired his name as a result of Harriet mis-hearing a remark of mine quite unconnected with the subject. The Electric Cinema was showing a Pasolini season and I must have volunteered ...”

“... Stories – an improbable confection of soulful eyes, hollow cheeks, frizzy facial hair and black leather. But although the impression that Boyle is a low-life lion of the interstates is strenuously maintained by his publishers – who report that he was a child of the Sixties, ‘a maniacal crazy-driver’ who ate anything he could lay his hands ...”

“... come to an interview. It was the end of August. A tall, imposing woman came up the front steps in black Oxfords and a black skirt, black jacket and wide-brimmed black hat. Her shirt was a brightly patterned cotton print, short-sleeved. Her hair was ...”