“... 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 ...”

“... his argument for yet another biography on the view he claims the world has had of her since her death as ‘a Diana before Diana’. This is a pitch of sorts, sure enough, but what grips me is why he would want to do it. Imagine making the effort to think of a reason to write a biography of Princess Margaret. Imagine committing months of working life to ...”

“... and glamour. Diana’s dresses, exhibited at Kensington Palace more than twenty years after her death, still drew the crowds. Last year Prince Charles came higher than David Gandy and David Beckham in GQ’s rankings for best-dressed Briton. The queen has been a global celebrity longer than anyone anywhere.The contract between the royal family and the ...”

“... leaving their father doubly burdened by grief and an inability to avenge his eldest son’s death. In despair, King Hrethel abandons life’s joys and chooses ‘God’s light’, i.e. he either dies of grief or enters a monastery. In the Historia Brittonum Arthur slays his own son, there called Amr, without recognising him. Amr is buried in a ...”

“... young women with a blade hidden in the tripod and recording their expressions at the moment of death. Mark himself was used by his camera-obsessed father, who particularly enjoyed capturing ‘the reactions of the nervous system to fear’. In a home movie of Mark as a child, Powell appears as the tyrant father and his son as Mark. Powell implicates ...”

“... departments to pledge to improve the proportion of women in ‘leadership’ positions. As Sarah Banet-Weiser observes, the rhetoric of female ‘empowerment’ is now a standard marketing tool. Feminism hasn’t just acquired establishment approval, it has managed to become voguish. As Banet-Weiser puts it, we are ‘living in a moment in North ...”

“... and Randolph was barred, for a time, from all social occasions of political significance. Sarah Churchill lived on an emotional high-wire as an actress, and Diana committed suicide in the last year of Churchill’s life. Only Mary, with her husband Christopher Soames, provided a sheet-anchor of stability. Where Churchill’s public life is ...”

“... in the second of his sonnets for Jarrell, the one that restages his friend’s peculiar death (Jarrell was sideswiped by a car in the course of an evening walk): black-gloved, black-coated, you plod out stubbornly as if in lockstep to grasp your blank not-I at the foot of the tunnel … as if asleep, Child Randall, greeting the car, and approving ...”

“... consider Claudine de Tencin, daughter of a provincial judge who sent her to a nunnery. After his death she sued to gain release from her vows, moved to Paris, and in a startlingly short time became one of the grand literary hostesses of Paris, as well as mistress to the prime minister and several other leading figures. She used her political influence to ...”

“... wrote a note, rearranged the family photographs on the mantelpiece and hanged himself. Curtis’s death was inevitably seen as authenticating his dark lyrics, though at the time the content of the lyrics hadn’t been clear even to those close to the band. In 1978, Morley wrote that he had given up trying to make out the words (he blamed ‘the perils of fast ...”

“... and Culture of Pregnancy (2018), Garbes drew attention to America’s relatively high maternal death rate: ‘I’m not trying to scare you unnecessarily. While death in pregnancy and childbirth is rare here, it is nowhere close to rare enough.’ Every year, Garbes noted, between 700 and 900 Americans die in ...”

“... covered in earth’. Missing in the photographs is his hair colour. In 1896, crushing heavily on Sarah Bernhardt (she had dazzled him at her salon, reclining on a polar bear pelt next to her pet lion), Renard told her that before age and experience turned him blond, he was ‘a redhead, once, downright ginger and frankly vicious’. We hear about this in his ...”

“... to the tragedy and therefore fails to account for Koresh’s hold over his followers. Preacher of Death has the advantage of Marc Breault’s contribution. Breault, a senior member of the Branch Davidians who defected in 1989, was the prime instigator of the legal moves that culminated in the ATF raid last February. Martin King, an Australian television ...”

“... be gracious, she could be businesslike, she could be ruthless; it is said she sometimes signs death warrants with her own hand … Strangely enough, I have never heard anybody comment on her perfume. It is the most delicious either of us has ever smelled. She had what appears to have been a one-night stand with Wendell Willkie, Roosevelt’s Republican ...”

“... the Act of Settlement settled little, except the succession in the House of Hanover upon Anne’s death without issue, and it affected Anne not at all, since most of its other provisions were either soon repealed, or were not scheduled to come into operation until after her death, or simply formalised existing practice and ...”