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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... It’s a good time to be a Muslim writing about ‘the trouble with Islam’, to borrow the title of a recent jeremiad by Irshad Manji, a Pakistani-Canadian lesbian feminist. Readers in the West, especially Americans, are eager to know ‘what went wrong with Islam’, as Bernard Lewis delicately puts it, particularly if it can be traced to cultural pathology and envy of ‘our freedom ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... The question​ ‘Why are there no great women artists?’ was first put to Linda Nochlin in 1970 by the New York gallerist Richard Feigen. It was a genuine inquiry. He would love, he said, to show women artists. The problem was he couldn’t find any good enough. Stumped for an answer at the time, Nochlin continued to consider the question ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... tended to be more open and meritocratic than most European land-based organisations at this time. Black sailors were not immune from discrimination, but those who were freemen and even some who were slaves seem often to have enjoyed better prospects and treatment on board Royal Navy ships than blacks labouring on the land. Jews were disproportionately ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of 1878 shares a certain formal identity with Whistler’s all too famous Arrangement in Grey and Black: Portrait of the Painter’s Mother (1871) in terms of pose and colour, but Cassatt’s mother is shown not staring blankly into space, an object within a world of objects, but rather in solid three-quarter view, and reading with great concentration. What ...”

“... 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 ...”