“... about the age of twenty shows him in a Cavalier lace collar and a cloak lined with red. Anne Bateman, painted a year or so later, is also board- (and perhaps bored-) stiff. Five years on, in 1760, he painted William Brooke, four times Mayor of Doncaster: a mercer dressed in good brown velvet with a great belly swelling above spread knees, and arms ...”

“... crowd, it seems premature to proclaim a new era for Henry Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling. Tears, as Anne Vincent-Buffault suggests, have a rhetoric as well as a history, and shedding them while making war is not the same thing as weeping at the loss of a race – or even in defence of your wife, as Muskie did in 1972. Muskie’s tears were prompted by the ...”

“... humanity of ordinary babies or marvel at it. In a woodcut by Hans Baldung Grien, dated 1511, St Anne is fondling the infant’s genitalia, while he chucks the Virgin under the chin, an amorous gesture with a tradition going back to the Song of Songs (and here signifying their mystical marriage), while Joseph looks understandingly on. Steinberg (who throws ...”

“... his identity and whereabouts: ‘David Sumner, a.k.a. David Jones, lives in Aloha, Oregon. He was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and spent his childhood in England. His work has been published in Hawaii Review, Puerto del Sol, Mississippi Review, and many other magazines.’ One of Bowers’s letters reached the poetry editor of Seneca Review just as the ...”

“... shaky. All is not lost, though. What these writers have in common – Marianne Moore, Katherine Anne Porter, Rebecca West, P.L. Travers, Simone de Beauvoir, Elizabeth Bishop, Nadine Gordimer and Anne Sexton, who appear in the volume alongside the writers already mentioned – is that they are not men, which is not as ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”