“... half-drowned and drugged – and he is haunted by memories of his attendance at the beheading of Anne Boleyn and at the burning of heretics, one immolation so slow they ‘fairly sweated the blood out of him’. Poverty upsets him, most of all the children ‘thin and ragged, displaying their sores and deformities’ that drift through the ...”

“... We no longer have his manuscript corrections, only the edition produced from them by his daughter Anne in 1801. Thomas Keymer and Alice Wakely, the editors of the Oxford edition, suggest that Anne might well have included changes of her own, as well as those of Richardson’s other daughter, Martha, who had died in ...”

“... or like Audrey Tautou, the latest face of Chanel No. 5, who also plays the young Coco Chanel in Anne Fontaine’s Coco before Chanel. So far as one can tell, Chanel was never fully contented (she boasted that she did not require ‘that daily dose of poison, recently invented, that we call happiness’ and her restless scissors were always ...”

“... in its duties, private litigation was brought to secure compliance. When Ronald Reagan appointed Anne Gorsuch (mother of the newest Supreme Court justice, Neil Gorsuch) to head the EPA, he asked if she was willing to ‘bring it to its knees’. She slashed its budget and, as the New York Times put it, ‘sabotaged the agency’s enforcement effort’. In ...”

“... were an affront to newly independent Catholic Ireland, and its brutal subject-matter still has the power to shock. Yet the huge body of scholarship that had begun to grow up around Yeats even before he wrote the play has tended to muffle its strangeness. It is the great achievement of the second volume of Roy Foster’s superb biography that it delivers us ...”

“... however, our law has nevertheless managed to retain an authority quite astonishing in its robust power to silence competing perspectives and to impose a legitimacy seemingly grounded on nothing more than its own brute assertion. The effort to explain this striking authority has led to the proliferation within American legal academies of important and ...”

“... was no longer, though, the sort of influence Henry wished for his daughter. After his marriage to Anne Boleyn and the birth of their daughter, Elizabeth, Mary was sent to join the household of the infant princess. There, she was surrounded by connections of the Boleyn queen. Margaret was superfluous; curtly, Henry wrote her off as a fool. If he had trusted ...”

“... introduction: that the value of the diary does not lie in its characters and scenes, but in its power to put flesh on the dry bones of parish records. Though the principal characters in East Hoathly’s many bastardy cases don’t speak directly, their actions speak for them, especially the brisk Turner’s. Exceptional efforts were called for late in ...”

“... St Helena. Anderson was soon freed. This was, on any showing, an astonishing exercise of judicial power and authority. But it was not novel. Two and a half centuries earlier, in 1604, the Council in the Marches of Wales, an offshoot of the Privy Council, ordered its jailkeeper, Francis Hunnyngs, to confine Walter Witherley ‘in little ease’ for his ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... age’ in the long 15th century (c.1380-1520) for workers, who leveraged their labour power into higher wages, a better quality of life and a mountain of consumer goods? Katherine French provides a new angle on these questions by considering domestic life and material culture in London, as revealed by the abundant evidence in wills. Late medieval ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... any endeavour that smacks of artifice, Welty was self-made, something which delighted Katherine Anne Porter. ‘She has never studied the writing craft in any college. She has never belonged to a literary group ... Nothing else that I know about her could be more satisfactory to me than this.’ Despite Welty’s prompt adoption by Robert Penn Warren and ...”

“... hour’ of his time. In a postscript the judge recommends the Broadway production of The Diary of Anne Frank. Question 1 is: ‘If you had been living in Nazi Germany in the 1930s, would you have written such a story?’ Question 6 is: ‘What set of aesthetic values makes you think that the cheap is more valid than the noble and the slimy is more truthful ...”

“... This is of course the name borne throughout the poet’s writing career by that Anne Hathaway who is, if Andrew Gurr is right, the single person named in the sequence – in the apparently early and also trivial Sonnet 145 (where ‘hate away’ quibblingly = ‘hathaway’ in Elizabethan pronunciation). In fact, even if we don’t accept ...”