“... one of the Third Secretaries in the Chancery, became an admirer, friend and opponent at tennis of Sarah Bernhardt, of whom he later wrote a biography, and, though attracted to Catholicism, put off conversion from ‘sheer cowardice and fright of Uncle Tom’. It was not until 1909 that he defied family opinion and entered the Church. He later wrote of his ...”

“... out of obscurity: Luciana Berger, Chuka Umunna, Chris Leslie, Anna Soubry, Heidi Allen and Sarah Wollaston are in varying degrees familiar to politics-watchers – though none of them has enjoyed a distinguished ministerial career, or ever become a darling of the party membership. But this no longer matters. All of them – Shukers as well as Chukas ...”

“... In a letter of 1911 he told her that ‘I used to follow you ardently.’ But after her death Braddon’s reputation declined, along with the reputations of many other innovative Victorian women writers. When I was researching her work in the early 1970s her books were out of print. Dover Books brought out a paperback edition of Lady Audley’s ...”

“... and have now come in from the cold. These include Rudy Giuliani, Newt Gingrich, John Bolton and Sarah Palin. All of them are touted as potential cabinet appointees but all of them have enemies among the Republicans in the Senate who could block their bids for office and return them to permanent vacation as back-up commentators on Fox News. The fate of these ...”

“... to produce, Moira Demos and Laura Ricciardi minutely reconstruct the investigation of Halbach’s death. In particular, their series explores the possibility that the police framed Steven Avery for the killing and obtained a false confession from Brendan Dassey. The show has been a huge hit. It so moved and angered its audience that in January 2016, a few ...”

“... biography, Testament of Friendship, Vera’s tribute, published five years after Winifred’s death at the age of 37 and, like Brittain’s earlier volume of memoirs, Testament of Youth, never since out of print. And then in the 1970s, that celebration by the women’s movement of this shining example of sisterhood and of the struggles of our great ...”

“... lawyer specialising in medical malpractice suits. The event that changed Edwards’s life was the death of his teenage son, Wade, in a road accident in 1996. His response to this tragedy was to spend a chunk of his personal fortune getting himself elected to the US Senate for his home state of North Carolina, though not before he had enhanced that fortune by ...”

“... people died during the massacre, which became known as ‘the wild action’, but Schulz’s death was not random. He had come under the protection of a Gestapo officer who admired one of his pictures. The Gestapo officer gave him a pass out of the ghetto. Returning from an expedition in search of bread, Schulz was shot by a member of the SS as an act of ...”

“... with dignity. I just knew that no one would ever be turned away.’ The centre’s director, Sarah Blyth, couldn’t help Letts and her friend, but listened while Letts talked about her son.The story was familiar. Vancouver is one of the cities worst hit by the opioid crisis – almost seven people die here every day from overdoses. Across British ...”

“... Library. It is about three o’clock in the afternoon, on a steel-grey day two weeks after the death of Damilola Taylor. The centre of Peckham is thronged with police officers, all wearing high-visibility luminous yellow vests, and with equipment strapped around their waists on webbing belts, inflating the clothing around their upper bodies. I ask again ...”

“... Thomas had been among his guides from the outset. Heaney’s ‘Follower’, from his first book, Death of a Naturalist (1966), took soundings from ‘As the team’s head-brass’: its tripping between ‘furrow’ and ‘narrowed’, ‘fell’ and ‘follow’ nods to Thomas’s strewn doublings ...”

“... then in force. Here comes the difference. The young woman who leaked the Cruise missile document, Sarah Tisdall, was prosecuted under the Act and sent to prison for six months. Leon Brittan was not prosecuted. He was knighted and later appointed as European Commissioner. Collette Bowe (who, after all, was only carrying out orders) was not prosecuted. She kept ...”

“... clever, frequently cloying. The story it tells is that of the life and aesthetically pleasing death by suicide of Edwin, 11-year-old author of Cartoons, a novel, we are told, of genius. It is also that of Edwin’s biographer, Jeffrey, a mere half-year older, whose exhaustively solemn record of his lifelong friend’s minutest peculiarities and ...”

“... year, having composed an ode celebrating the Jameson Raid and the well-known lines on the death of Edward VII. Along the electric wires the message came, He is no better, he is much the same. That at least is funny – indeed positively good in its way – and preferable to the era of Ghastly Good Taste in public verses that was to follow. Even ...”

“... to works in prose: Ros Barber’s The Marlowe Papers took the Desmond Elliott Prize in 2013 and Sarah Crossan’s One (about conjoined twins) carried off the Carnegie in 2016. These are good omens for The Long Take, which has been long-listed for the Man Booker this year. The Long Take is not just a verse novel, it’s a historical verse novel set in the ...”