“... to do with Simón. In effect, they become a couple who don’t have sex and aren’t sure what drew them together in the first place, semi-strangers linked only by a concern for their child’s welfare. So, apart from being, in some way, Joseph, Mary and Jesus, they might not be such an unusual type of family.Most of the time David, who was judged to be ...”

“... wish to part. In ‘The Fête’ – a poem Ezra Pound chose for the Egoist, and on which Knox drew for his parody (it begins: ‘To-night again the moon’s white mat/Stretches across the dormitory floor’) – a sixteen-year-old French boy recalls escaping from boarding school to go to the circus. ‘The black clown, with his dirty grin/ Lay, sprawling ...”

“... tend to take emphatic pride in their nation’s carriers: the Royal Navy refers to HMS Queen Elizabeth, launched in 2014, as ‘4.5 acres of floating sovereign power’. The US has eleven full-size fleet carriers, more than the rest of the world combined. It wasn’t always so. Japan had ten carriers by 1940 and Japanese admirals pioneered the carrier ...”

“... all the claptrap that was explicit by the time Cat on a Hot Tin Roof reached the screen with Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman. The play and movie were both big successes; Williams lived on them for decades. But the struggle over the third act had been painful, and his friendship with Kazan was never quite the same. He said once that the rewriting ...”

“... lavish and well reproduced (with the sole exception of the portrait of the Moorish ambassador to Elizabeth I following preliminary page 64, a painting which hangs in the Shakespeare Institute and was long rumoured to have been the source for the cut of its former director Stanley Wells’s beard; for some reason this picture looks slightly out of focus, as ...”

“... which Boyd was a stronger suspect than the man originally charged with Nikki’s murder. As Wright drew the jury’s attention to them, it began to feel as if he were also prosecuting the original police inquiry.Heron,​ then 23, who lived on the same floor of Wear Garth as Nikki’s grandparents and Boyd, was arrested on 15 October 1992. Police computers had ...”

“... The Suez Canal, according to a recent history of the WHO by Marcos Cueto, Theodore Brown and Elizabeth Fee, made Europeans feel ‘dangerously close to India’.† In 1900 the fear was the imminent completion of a railway line linking Berlin to Mecca, seen as a cholera hotbed.Cholera, which returned to Europe repeatedly during the 19th century, was the ...”

“... more curvy – I am of course referring to her face, on which, unlike Dietrich, Garbo or indeed Elizabeth Taylor (whom she saw as a rival), there isn’t a single straight line. There is no flattening wash over this face. Even Laurence Olivier, who mostly couldn’t stand her, had to concede that every time she appears in The Prince and the Showgirl, she ...”

“... creature’): his attitude seems businesslike and not censorious. An exceptional case which drew a stronger reaction was that of Elizabeth Elless, who was taken violently ill and died when only two days from full term. Turner saw there would have to be an autopsy, arranged it and attended it; his unemotional entry ...”

“... against the bishops were excised from the record. But these must have been the qualities that drew a remarkable prophecy from John Hampden, who happened also to be his first cousin: ‘That slovenly fellow which you see before us; I say that sloven, if we should come to have a breach with the King (which God forbid), in such case will be one of the ...”

“... here! – They even begin to become interesting from their excessive immensity of boredoms … drew nonsenses.’ Uglow’s book is the best biography of Lear yet written, not because it always avoids the boring, but because it finds ways to let boredom shed light on – and provide opportunity for – other things. I doubt her readings of the poems would ...”

“... drive about the sun? Just such another durst make love to you, Whom not ambition led but dullness drew. No amorous thought could his dull heart incline, But he would have a passion for ’twas fine; That, a new suit, and what he next must say, Runs in his idle head the livelong day. Hard-hearted saint, since ’tis your will to be So unrelenting pitiless to ...”

“... the rude irruption of European adventurers into the New World. In the royal charter that Queen Elizabeth conferred on Sir Humphrey Gilbert in 1583, she granted him full power over the soil of ‘those large and ample countreys [that] extended Northward from the cape of Florida … to dispose thereof, of every part thereof in fee simple or ...”

“... other. Together over several years they wrote The Wise Wound, a study of the menstrual cycle that drew on Shuttle’s dreams as well as her menstrual history and Redgrove’s analysis of these experiences. If Shuttle sometimes felt ‘experimented on’, she came to accept her period as embodying ‘a transgressive sense of the feminine’ that was ...”

“... who composed its city comedy-like scenes – and because the text we have is unfinished. Hytner drew in popular unrest of the sort shown in the Jack Cade scenes of Henry VI Part II and by the mob in Julius Caesar. To make Timon of Athens a play for today is to cut through a lot of differences between Jacobean and modern London. Again, this is ...”