“... was propaganda – a compromise he regretted nearly as soon as he’d written it. Dovlatov was born in 1941, the only child of a theatre director and an actress, and began writing just as Khrushchev’s thaw ended and censorship tightened once again. Editors praised his fiction, but couldn’t publish it; he earned money mostly as a journalist. His ...”

“... awareness that the ‘king bee’ was female coincided fortuitously with the reign of Queen Anne, enabling one Joseph Warder to publish, in 1712, his fawning book, The True Amazons, or The Monarchy of Bees: ‘I cannot but wish,’ he wrote, ‘that all your Majesty’s subjects were as unanimously loyal as the subjects of the Queen Bee, in whose Nature ...”

“... Who was this son? What did he represent? What was his legacy? In her illuminating book, Anne Rogerson focuses on Ascanius as a figure whose role in the chain of transmission and inheritance deserves more attention than it has so far received. In Virgil’s day he acquired a new importance, because the man who ruled the empire after the destruction ...”

“... Greifswald was.’ And then al-Jarrah met Sengün and, according to Assem, fell in love. A German-born daughter of Turkish immigrants, she was in Greifswald studying dentistry. Like him, she was tall, slim, athletic and fashionable; she wore high-heeled boots and jeans. They began to plan a life together. But according to a German intelligence report, at the ...”

“... Thatcher and Helmut Kohl). He also conducted interviews with Mitterrand’s wife, Danielle, and Anne Pingeot, his long-time mistress. The result is a rich, detailed and dependable biography, framed as a ‘study in ambiguity’. Who was Mitterrand? Was he really a man of the left? Did he have any strong beliefs at all? Was he really the most successful ...”

“... Sartre was injected with mescaline by his friend Daniel Lagache, a psychiatrist at the Sainte-Anne Hospital in Paris, Simone de Beauvoir phoned to check in on the first-time tripper. Her call came as a reprieve. As Sartre told her in a scrambled voice, she had interrupted a losing battle against a mass of octopuses. He had been promised a safe ...”

“... is an epic account of the experience of the English Dissenters under the Restoration. Defoe was born on about 30 September 1660, a few streets from where Milton lived in St Giles Cripplegate. In the course of his career, he often quoted Milton, and though he was careful to criticise the Commonwealth and Protectorate – a necessary journalistic strategy ...”

“... a second time, when a woman in the congregation forbade them. The poor girl, whose name was Anne Stevenson, declared that about three years ago she had a child by him, and that he had many times promised her marriage ..., and that he had kept her company so lately as Michaelmas last, and farther that she would be glad to be married to him at any ...”

“... very strong condemnation in Islam) and of lining their own pockets. The US ambassador, Anne Patterson (fresh from a stint in Pakistan), had hoped that Morsi would be an Egyptian Erdoğan, but quite apart from the fact that the model was losing his shine, the history and political dynamics of the two countries are very different. Snubbed by ...”

“... the ocean in their mouth.I am going to glorify the sink with the toothpaste spat in it.Ruefle was born in 1952 and had a peripatetic upbringing as the daughter of a military officer. These days, perhaps unsurprisingly, she prefers to stay home. ‘It is an unspeakable honour to have been invited and an unspeakable honour to be here,’ she said at a literary ...”

“... in their teens, and from the early twenties (Frances Burney and Horace Walpole). Johnson was born in September 1709; the first letter of Volume I is dated 30 October 1731, when Johnson was 22. There must have been some letters by the younger Johnson – to his relation and benefactor Cornelius Ford, for instance – but his youth has gone missing. No ...”

“... returning to America he was dead from a gunshot wound in a Los Angeles hotel room.Milman Parry was born in Oakland, California, on 23 June 1902. His father was variously a prosthetics fitter, a nurse and a pharmacist who devised his own hair tonic and dandruff remedy. When a masked gunman tried to hold up the drugstore where he worked he threw the cash ...”

“... or killed because of what they do or do not wear, clothes may be a matter of life or death. Anne Higonnet’s new book is somewhat belied by its subtitle, which plays to the idea of fashion as accessory to the mainstream of history. ‘Styled’ suggests that her subjects hovered on the edge of the revolution, adding a cockade here and straightening a ...”

“... than writing high verse, going back three centuries to observe, and talk with, the colonial poet Anne Bradstreet, for whom, by contrast, the claims of marriage, motherhood and above all Christianity are much more important than those of poetry. Of the poem’s 57 stanzas (based on the stanza Yeats adopted from Abraham Cowley for ‘In Memory of Major Robert ...”

“... Some writers discover their powers gradually. Others – Anne Carson, for example – spring from the head of Zeus. With three books in four years during the mid-1990s, the Canadian poet, classical scholar, essayist and translator became suddenly prominent in North America; she had found readers in Britain as well by 2001, when The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos won the T ...”