“... plant, they will remain for the duration what they already are. They constitute the stuff of death rather than the stuff of life. Narrative keeps fresh the capacity for memory and desire which, in turn, freshens narrative. What is kept fresh by the description of bits and pieces of clothing, or kept sour by it, is something else ...”

“... with Michael Jackson and Nicolas Cage – and for being Elvis’s daughter. Before her death, in 2023, of cardiac arrest caused by complications from weight-loss surgery, she had been recording tapes of material for a memoir. These recordings form the basis of From Here to the Great Unknown, a memoir told in two voices – those of Lisa Marie and ...”

“... Ordnance, producing reliable maps for use in the subjugation of the Highlands. By the time of his death, his astonishing industry had earned him many years of genteel prosperity, selling his original drawings and paintings, publishing collections of his prints, taking on private pupils, and teaching at the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich. But in the last ...”

“... page, and mistranscribes the sources, like Todd, which it pillages. Spender refers to errors in Sarah Fielding’s memorial tablet as ‘symptomatic of the “mistakes” in the documentation of women’s lives’. But is the matter remedied by calling Ellis Cornelia Knight ‘Cornelius’? Or Helen Maria Williams ‘Helena’? Or Lady Mary Wortley Montagu ...”

“... to the support of the powerful Duke of Rutland. Financially secure, he was at last able to marry Sarah Elmy, to whom he had been attached for the previous ten or more years. After The Village Crabbe published only one more work, The News-Paper (1785), before he left off writing poetry altogether for almost twenty years. In this period he devoted himself to ...”

“... copies.Murray discerns three events as having formed young Aldous’s personality: the premature death of his mother, Julia Huxley (née Arnold), when he was 14; his temporary blindness three years later; and – most damaging – the suicide of his older brother, Trevenen, who hanged himself when Aldous was 20. These traumas ...”

“... nowadays are in love with things, and with people who were fascinated with them. Some, including Sarah Ross in Everyday Renaissances (2016), have scrutinised post mortem inventories to identify the books that physicians, notaries and housewives, none of them famous, owned and read. For her forthcoming study, Engineering the Eternal City, Pamela Long ...”

“... decades the famous and worthy, or would-be worthy, have queued up to appear on it. On his death in 1965, Herbert Morrison, Clement Attlee’s heir presumptive for 25 years, was found to have a list of his eight favourite songs in his wallet in case he should ever be invited on – he never was. In his 1982 play, The Real Thing, Tom Stoppard described ...”

“... was cold comfort in a life of hiding, sexual misery, mistrust, the constant fear of betrayal and death. The old mafia reward hadn’t been wealth but power. ‘Giving orders is better than fucking,’ was an often-heard mafia saying. Walter is played by Bryan Cranston, previously best known for comedy roles – the father in Malcolm in the Middle and the ...”

“... that she did. Among musicologists, ‘the Alma Problem’ refers to the fact that after Mahler’s death she suppressed many of his letters, in order to present herself in a more positive light, and told false stories about their life together. (‘The silence of the famous dead,’ as Janet Malcolm put it, ‘offers an enormous temptation to the ...”

“... her mother was her principal subject: ‘Somehow, her adored image blotted out my own. It took her death for me to be able to start to see myself. And then I found a way in.’ That way in involved choosing other compass points from which to take her bearings. In Letters to Gwen John (2022), her second book, she writes beautiful, confiding letters, which are ...”

“... and Julie’s domestic existence is shattered; in Enduring Love, Clarissa and Joe witness the death of John Logan as he falls from a balloon, are changed for ever, and spend the rest of the novel trying to absorb the consequences of the spectacle; Black Dogs is in part about how Bernard Tremaine, a politician, scientist and rationalist, drifts away from ...”

“... thinks, to modernist and postmodern writers from James Joyce to Don DeLillo, Margaret Atwood and Sarah Waters. Chapters on the delight Dickens took in names and his use of coincidence demonstrate with equal conviction that technique can be a way of knowing the world.Mullan’s accounts of key preoccupations ...”

“... of steam trains and ocean liners. In the years between his appearance in Chicago and his early death in 1902, he became the face of a quintessentially modern – because newly global – form of religiosity.Harris’s sprawling biography lucidly explores the moment when religious figures became conscious of themselves as global actors. In books on the ...”

“... and much of the mud has stuck to the Duke of Windsor himself, to say nothing of the Duchess. Sarah Bradford’s biography of George VI portrayed him as the ultimate sacrificial sovereign, overwhelmed and destroyed by events he could neither control nor comprehend. And Philip Ziegler’s official life of Lord Mountbatten suggested that the royal ...”