“... in … as background to her work’, ostensibly because it was ‘what that very private lady would have wished’, but perhaps also because it was relatively uneventful. Jennifer Kloester’s new book has no such scruples: granted ‘carte blanche’ by Heyer’s only son, she has been through a vast quantity of ‘new and untapped’ letters and ...”

“... cards shuffled and dealt from some unnumberable deck: ‘Bronzebeard’, ‘the king’, ‘the lady’, ‘the French brothers’, ‘the blond one’, ‘the forked nose’. What’s more, Nostradamus seems to take perverse delight in demonstrating repeatedly the relative futility of prediction: ‘Death, then pillage: good advice, coming late’: When ...”

“... this effusion, surpassing even Mervyn Griffith-Jones’s remarks in leading the prosecution of Lady Chatterley’s Lover 80 years later, it was not surprising that Jessel ordered custody of Mabel to be given to Besant. Annie then launched an appeal for a judicial separation, which Jessel refused. This judgment effectively barred her in perpetuity from ...”

“... His star continued to rise in the 1930s, and the Maly Theatre’s premiere of his second opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, was the event of the 1934 Moscow season; Stalin, Molotov and other leaders came to a later performance to see what all the fuss was about. Unfortunately, they didn’t like what they heard and saw – not tuneful enough, too ...”

“... of 37 Ridley Avenue (this on page 37); an abortion Leah had; the spooky monologue of a statue, Our Lady of Willesden, ‘the Black Madonna’; and a scene at a pharmacy, when Leah is given the wrong packet of photographs, one with pictures of Shar. Hard to tell the significance of that 37: a prime number; the normal human body temperature in Celsius; the ...”

“... the original sister, the story’s ostensible victim until she later resurfaces as a cheerful old lady. The narrator admits that she and her mother, the one who actually knew the characters, would have written the story differently, according to their respective notions of sex, each determined by the progressive ideas of their times. As a nod to ...”

“... Nasreen, who bears ‘no more resemblance to Diana or Ceres or Proserpina (or for that matter Lady Lazarus or Emily Dickinson or the Three Witches) than I myself do to Actaeon or Sir Gawain or Joseph Shapiro.’ Most stalkers, according to Reid Meloy, suffer from what he calls a ‘narcissistic linking fantasy’: intense admiration becomes an imaginary ...”

“... spelling of ‘Vodou’ deliberately.) Under Duvalier, Fred Voodoo told reporters about the first lady’s refrigerated closet for furs. After the quake, he told them that rain leaked into his tent at night and forced everyone to their feet, holding their babies till the storm passed. Once written up, Fred Voodoo’s trials are forgotten. He is a disposable ...”

“... while in Edwin Lutyens’s utopia, Hampstead Garden Suburb, she presides from the dome of the Lady Chapel in St Jude’s, painted by a returned soldier, who surrounded her with a parade of heroines from the Bible, figures of history, and contemporary women busy at numerous vital tasks. Even if, as some historians argue, it was the war and women’s war ...”

“... Parliament. Johnson, if he has a working majority, will have less need to bypass Parliament. So Lady Hale, or her successor, can do her worst, and he will probably be fine with it, as he was ultimately fine with her doing her worst last time round. It is a Corbyn minority government that will feel the pinch of Johnson’s botched prorogation. Second, a ...”

“... a birthday in her absence, hardly suggests a close connection. In herself she’s a generic old lady, evoked largely by her possessions: a tarnished copper kettle, her tissue-holder shaped like a hen. There are usually more atoms whizzing around, even in what we’re used to calling the nuclear family. Collectively, Phillips’s choices have the effect of ...”

“... she affects to know nothing of her husband’s behaviour before and during her stint as First Lady. ‘Mind you,’ she told a local newspaper, ‘they were talking about Sierra Leone. It was not a Liberian issue.’ Lack of accountability, among powerful families, clans, political colleagues and comrades-in-arms, is guaranteed to flourish when we ...”

“... of Jane Seymour with Henry’s hoped-for heir is darkly shadowed by the phantom pregnancy of Lady Lisle, wife of the governor of Calais. An interview with Henry’s daughter Mary, during which Cromwell tries to impress on her the need to obey her father or die resisting him, both of them conscious of the fact that she is of marriageable age and he ...”

“... than a trace of the millennialism that had informed her anti-slavery. Although, in her notorious Lady Byron Vindicated, she explicitly criticised the English marriage laws that made the position of the married woman ‘in many respects, precisely similar to that of the negro slave’, she, like Child, refused in the end to support Elizabeth Cady Stanton and ...”

“... extensible form of the sonnet sequence: his ‘I’ in love, the distant ‘you’ of the lady, and the yearning between the two, set up the main features of what later ages would call ‘lyric’. It wasn’t until the mid-16th century, though, that a tripartite division of all poetry into dramatic, epic and lyric media – a division roughly ...”