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upon Anne’s death without issue, and it affected Anne not at all, since most of its other provisions were either soon repealed, or were not scheduled to come into operation until after her death, or simply formalised existing practice and ...”

“... artificial boundary’ between medieval and early modern: it opens and closes with the death in 1553 of Edward VI, the attempted coup of Lady Jane Grey and the accession of Mary Tudor, whose brief reign prepared the way for Elizabeth. In order to rule England, these women had to act with firmness, decision and, if necessary, brutality: they had, in ...”

“... four men in suits, one of whom was reading out my letter. It explained that due to the recent death of my father, and the heavy business related to the tidying up of his estate, I had fallen behind in the paying of my taxes. I was truly sorry to have found myself in this position but the last three months had been a period of grief and shock as well as ...”

“... cent in projected national vote share. Labour narrowly lost the Runcorn by-election to Reform’s Sarah Pochin, a former Conservative. Reform took control of ten councils, where it will now administer budgets in the hundreds of millions. Farage took centre stage in the aftermath, declaring Reform the ‘main opposition party’: ‘We are the agents of ...”

“... called ‘a wonder’. In Careless People, her new book on the writing of The Great Gatsby, Sarah Churchwell proceeds with a sturdy working theory: that it helps to understand and appreciate the book if you know what went into it. She’s not thinking about all the social and intellectual ferment of Fitzgerald’s early life that made him the man and ...”

“... so ensuring a small measure of – fragmentary – survival. There was to be no coming back after death as an entity; the posthumous condition that Barthes imagined for himself was a sociable version of the one he had sought to inflict most unsociably on the humanist notion of the integral Author. In S/Z, the integral or notional Balzac is separated out ...”

“... told us he had been alarmed by her condition when she arrived and wasn’t prepared to sign a death certificate. In such situations, the case is reported to a coroner and a postmortem arranged.Nine hours earlier, Merope and I had been in the ambulance that sped north through the city to GOSH. I held Martha’s head in my hands; her eyes were taped ...”

“... Chapman Brothers are there, and Sam Taylor-Wood (as was), as well as the jeweller Shaun Leane, and Sarah Burton, who would take over the label after his death and made Kate Middleton’s wedding dress. All McQueen’s earliest associates seemed to have stayed with him the whole way: this was a family business built around a ...”

“... of his wife). It was here that she wrote her memoirs, and remained until Charles-Emmanuel’s death three years later. She then settled in London, where she became a colourful figure at the court of Charles II, her other early soupirant, and then James II, remaining there for the rest of her life. In the meantime the duc de Mazarin continued his ...”

“... was solemnised by Southey and Coleridge in joint marriage to a pair of sisters, Edith and Sarah Fricker – a lucky shot for Southey, very much less so for Coleridge. The commune that never took shape is now embalmed in a few poems and the Platonic heat of a frank correspondence; but the friends worked steadily in Bristol in 1795, from an energy of ...”

“... skeletal face’ as Deedes ‘lifted his glass of water and sipped it’. Thirteen years after his death she is still chewing over this ‘unpleasant’ encounter which she now attributes to Deedes’s own ‘twilight relationship’ with a much younger writer at the paper. In fact, she had simply dealt the wrong card. She played ...”

“... confined to mockery of its deadpan original, but his Tragedy of Tragedies; or, the Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great was attuned to a broader climate of false feeling and the bombast that floated it. Gillray worked from a similar ambition. Unlike Fielding, he made a career of it.His nearest precursor was Hogarth, in the kinetic scenes of Marriage à ...”

“... view of Medieval Europe – it comes just after a sentence which declares that the Black Death drove all fit people to work on the land, a view so wrong one hardly knows where to start correcting it – the tone of confidence in modern progress and ‘the Western World’ is unmistakable. But are children really ‘a separate kind of ...”

“... black and white dress is belied by its gloss. Her late husband had been in the slave trade. Mrs Sarah Clayton (a courtesy ‘Mrs’, she was unmarried) held a leading position in the coal trade in Liverpool; she points to a plan of Clayton Square, a development she oversaw personally. In this portrait, although the setting is not outdoors, the ...”

“... a corpse-filled sea; the crew drinking themselves senseless to blunt the horrors of near-certain death; and, on the adjacent cliffs, country folk aghast at a catastrophe they can do nothing to alleviate. An all too frequent scene is that of sailors, deeming themselves safe at last, broaching spirits in such quantities that they die on the spot. Fourteen ...”