“... Gingrich said it ‘would be like putting a Nazi sign next to the Holocaust Museum’. On Twitter, Sarah Palin wrote: ‘Ground Zero Mosque supporters: doesn’t it stab you in the heart, as it does ours throughout the heartland? Peaceful Muslims, pls refudiate.’ Polls showed that most Americans opposed it and that most residents of Manhattan, who know that ...”

“... undisputed first couple of the British stage. After Irving’s star waned, and even more after his death in 1905, Terry extended her range, not least into the work of her correspondent Bernard Shaw. She died, a national treasure, in 1928. The succeeding generation followed their parents into the business, though inevitably they were overshadowed. Laurence and ...”

“... than Macaulay’s supposed hypocrisy.Johnson was not alone in behaving this way. After the death of her husband in 1766, Macaulay found that as a single woman without a male protector her radical opinions were exposed to heavier criticism, now spiced with innuendo. In August 1770 the Gentleman’s Magazine published a lengthy and at times sexually ...”

“... of forty on 13 November 1973. He left (as the obituarists say) a wife and two children. Before his death he had published six novels, which were completed in the course of little more than a decade, and had written one more, which was to have been the first part of a trilogy about his mother’s death from cancer. He also ...”

“... of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Whatever else, it was a wild time to be alive and come close to death. The fierce young had never seemed more vivid. This is what one flier, Merrill McPeak, remembers from 269 missions:The late 1960s were a kind of confluence of several rivulets – there was the anti-war movement itself, the whole movement towards racial ...”

“... career was entwined, Ramsey didn’t fit the stereotype of the tortured genius. After his early death, he was eclipsed by Wittgenstein, whose influence dominated Cambridge philosophy for decades. Ramsey’s admirers have ventured to project what would have happened in philosophy had he lived. But, as he knew, the counterfactual is idle: there is no fact of ...”

“... library’s centenary as a public institution – a transformation Greene oversaw after Morgan’s death.) Some of the objects are breathtaking: the magnificently illustrated 13th-century Crusader Bible, which belonged to both Louis IX and Abbas the Great; the 15th-century Gospel Book made for an Ethiopian princess, which Greene coveted for a decade before the ...”

“... the treadwheel at Aylesbury Prison was removed in 1843 after three prisoners were crushed to death in a single year). The women, most of whom had been found guilty of prostitution or drunkenness, lived on F Wing, on the eastern side of the prison. Each cell wall had a list showing the daily prison routine. The day began at 5.45 a.m. in summer and 6.45 ...”

“... in the life and work of Ted Hughes was weird and transgressive that even now, 18 years after his death, it is hard to feel confident that his actions and beliefs and literary achievement can be judiciously and authoritatively assessed. For a start, he wrote and published at such a rate: Jonathan Bate’s bibliographic tally of Hughes’s books runs to more ...”

“... howled around the outskirts of each settlement, and a successful harvest often meant life or death to the community’. She goes on:The idea that our visible world is a whim and might be dissolved at any time hung on tenaciously. It was this profound conception of obedience to a stern and sovereign Absence that forged the fanatical energy for ...”

“... in 1953 and appeared in five separate editions, the last in 1994, nine years after Waterhouse’s death. Waterhouse’s history was quickly recognised as a classic. To a large extent he made the subject he was studying; or as Solkin puts it, ‘he revealed a verdant topography where previous observers had perceived a barren wilderness.’ He found numerous ...”

“... Party stayed away: all of the previous presidential and vice-presidential nominees (even Sarah Palin), with the exception of the nonagenarian Bob Dole; the Bush family and anyone who held an important post in the administrations of either Bush; 11 of the 16 candidates who ran against Trump in the primaries; the two most prominent Republicans in the ...”

“... a public as the American illustrated magazines are addressed to.’ Yet three years before her death, and in the midst of the Depression, she was threatening to leave Appleton ‘for the simple reason that I cannot afford to neglect any chance of selling my books’ – this despite the fact that in the Twenties she had largely abandoned her original ...”

“... which began in the 1890s, peaked between 1910 and 1920, and continued intermittently until her death in 1927, at the age of 50. In those days film was in its infancy and still silent (The Jazz Singer was released the year Duncan died). Because music – Chopin, Schubert, Brahms, Beethoven, Wagner – was the spiritual inspiration for so much of what she ...”

“... a lifelong romance with oneself. Pratt began a journal in 1925 and carried on writing until her death in 1986. She imagines her public from the start. ‘Reader please be kind to me!’ she writes winningly: ‘I am only 16 at present, and just realising life and beginning to think for myself. It’s all very thrilling in its strange newness.’ Jean wants ...”