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“... having been the object of your attentions. It’s like nailing the proverbial jelly to the wall. Susan Sontag talks about him slipping through the net of comparisons. It’s perhaps not beside the point to recall that when a very young man, Walser wanted to be an actor, and while that ambition may have been squelched in the course of a typically humiliating ...”

“... poor ate cheaper animals and cheaper cuts, too.) The key point, though, is that demand rose across the board, beyond that which even Britain’s intensive livestock farmers could supply. So Britain became ‘the stud farm of the world’, sending new strains of cattle to the pastoral grasslands of Argentina and the Antipodes, and then eating their ...”

“... 56 per cent voted to remain in the EU. Along the border with the Republic of Ireland, that figure rose to 65 per cent, though many in these parts did not cast their vote. ‘I didn’t understand it,’ one local man, Mervyn Johnston, told me. On the map, the village of Pettigo, where Johnston lives, is all but obliterated by the strong red line of the border ...”

“... two books about cats, some stories and a piece of autobiography. She also left two daughters (Susan Chitty and Lyndall Hopkinson) and more than a million words of diaries – work that some consider her greatest achievement, and the editing of which led to a public row (and legal action) between the girls, who disagreed about what kind of woman their ...”

“... life is the stated purpose of Lyndall Gordon’s biography of her three girlhood friends, Romy, Rose and Ellie, who never became famous for anything before they each died, younger than people are supposed to these days. Of course, an early death is almost as sexy as fame and riches, especially if it’s the death of a woman who is ...”

“... of individual crises: we will never again be inclined to see this postwar moment through the rose-tinted lens of cinematic reunions. But if these immediate postwar years were indeed ‘filled with tension, anxiety and anger’, why did the tension ebb rather than explode? Why did demobilisation remain (mostly) a private and not a social crisis? Allport ...”

“... on average better-fed, longer-lived, healthier and better-housed than ever before. Life expectancy rose significantly across the period (from 52 to 61 for men from 1910 to 1938 and from 55 to 66 for women), and infant mortality fell. Aggressive house-building by governments and private builders alike, coupled with the introduction of long-term mortgages, made ...”

“... we see today, a kind of miracle ensued. After the early Fifties, and for the next thirty years, as Susan Woodward explains in this careful and even-handed book, Yugoslavia was ‘a relatively prosperous, open and stable society’. And in this new society the South Slav peoples acquainted themselves with many happier aspects of the modern world. Schooling ...”

“... He knew not what to do – something, he felt, must be done – he rose, drew his writing-desk before him – sate down, took the pen – – found that he knew not what to do. Fond readers who dream of the poems Keats might have written had he lived past 25 and speculate about what works died with Shelley at 29, humane readers who deplore tuberculosis and drowning (together with rheumatic fever, arsenic and other wasters of Romantic genius), entertain a different and darker regret when they turn their attention to Coleridge, wishing, not that he had lived longer, but that he had died sooner ...”

“... co-dependency, poverty, misogyny, celebrity culture, Calista Flockhart, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden – all make an appearance here. Appignanesi tells or retells the stories of patients (most but not all of them female, some but not all of them creative figures), their caretakers (most but not all of them male), their disorders (some of bodily, some ...”

“... in the Attic, Sandra Gilbert, poet and professor at the University of California at Davis, and Susan Gubar, professor at Indiana University, planned a sequel: a feminist history of women’s writing in the 20th century. At first, they expected to complete it in just a few years, but they soon faced enormous obstacles in the material itself. The project ...”

“... taboo and threatened class identity. This simultaneous recognition and denial are apparent in Susan Brownmiller’s comment that Steinberg was ‘a familiar type. I’ve gone out with men like this,’ whereas Nussbaum ‘looked like nothing human’. How do we connect the good-looking Jewish lawyer from Greenwich Village with the inhuman wreckage he left ...”

“... one of the first medical commentators to write sympathetically about transsexuality). As Susan Stryker and Aren Aizura write in their introduction to the second of Routledge’s two monumental Transgender Studies readers, published in 2006 and 2013, however obsessed we may be with the most glamorous instances, most transsexual lives ‘are not ...”

“... Who is hotter than Mary McCarthy? Smarter than Susan Sontag? Funnier than Harold Bloom? Well, if you take her word for it, it’s Camille Paglia, come to set the world straight on the burning issues of our time: tenured radicals, date rape, the aesthetic evolution of Madonna. The self-styled genius and warrior woman seized public attention with her first book, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), a sweeping, Strindbergian analysis of culture as the war of the sexes ...”

“... tanner from an Italian ghetto, he converted to Catholicism, became a priest, was defrocked, then rose to become Poet of the Theatres in Vienna and wrote the librettos for Mozart’s great Italian operas. He later emigrated to America, where he spent some time working as a greengrocer before ending up as the first professor of Italian literature at Columbia ...”