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“... 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 ...”

“... The Hazlitt of our time’, said the Manchester Guardian, announcing the death of James Agate in 1947. An extravagant compliment, but the famous theatre reviewer did have one or two of Hazlitt’s characteristics. Though his journalism now seems too pompous-frivolous even for the theatre world, his reports of actors’ performances are often vivid and persuasive: he was quite learned in his subject and could communicate his own enthusiasm, making drama seem important – more important, perhaps, than it seems to us today ...”

“... after Dickens’s American Notes, has as its meaning that ‘promotion to institutional status is death to character.’ There’s no point arguing here against so flat a reading of either book, since it is offered merely as a wind-up to one of Conrad’s bravura follies. At the end of the chapter he tells us: America revenged itself on Dickens by making him ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... commemorating the 75th anniversary of her electrifying Paris debut and the 25th anniversary of her death. With its pictures of Baker costumed and nude (and often both at the same time), with some fantastic outfits she actually wore and film of her dancing on stage, with snapshots of her among friends and admirers, the show recaptures the self-knowingly playful ...”

“... this person from the violinist, there would be ‘no injustice’, tragic though the violinist’s death would be. The third party might even be seen as a good Samaritan, according to Thomson. Why? Because, in such a situation, ‘you cannot extricate yourself.’In describing third parties as ‘good Samaritans’, Thomson was probably not thinking of Madame ...”

“... have taken a Manhattan avant-gardist brought up as a scion of the Bank of Tokyo and educated at Sarah Lawrence to cut through this bedraggled but corrupt crew. But what Ono seems to have told Lennon is only another version of the sort of advice Arthur Ballard seems to have already given him. Ono insisted that he was an artist and ought to be proud of ...”

“... Even a smile​ could put Charles Lamb in mind of death. ‘The fine ladies, or fine gentlemen, who show me their teeth,’ he wrote, ‘show me bones.’ He cared not ‘to be carried with the tide that smoothly bears human life to eternity’.I am in love with this green earth, – the face of town and country, – the unspeakable rural solitudes, and the sweet security of streets … Sun, and sky, and breeze, and solitary walks, and Summer holidays, and the greenness of fields, and the delicious juices of meats and fishes, and society, and the cheerful glass, and candle-light, and fireside conversations, and innocent vanities, and jests, and irony itself – do these things go out with life?Faced with the ‘inevitable spoiler’, Lamb lived as many lives as he could ...”

“... With the death of Michel Foucault the end of another era of French philosophy suddenly seems imminent. Jean-Paul Sartre died long after the Existentialist era had dwindled, and that phase of his philosophical work had been absorbed. Like Jacques Lacan’s death, however, Foucault’s comes at a point where debate has not settled the question of either the viability of his vision or the importance of the Post-Structuralist period ...”

“... over the two years of war, most as a result of famine – figures comparable to or higher than the death toll over a decade of war in Syria. The facts were known. But wasn’t Ethiopia the land of famines? What were a few more corpses floating down the Tekeze?With the exception of a brief threat to the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, in November 2021, the war ...”

“... present self to his old self: sometimes from his old self to his present self. Referring to the death of his mother, ‘I, once a lord of language,’ he says, ‘have no words to express my anguish and my shame.’ Straightway he proceeds to revel in the survival of that lordship. ‘What I suffered then, and still suffer, is not for pen to write or paper ...”

“... a milkmaid and a lady” – to the elegant Sir Charles Bunbury, formerly the husband of the Lady Sarah Lennox with whom George III had been so much in love before duty forced him to marry his German queen.’ There’s also a Victorianism of outlook, in assertions such as one to the effect that Mrs Siddons’s loss of popularity at one time was the fault ...”

“... novels about relationships and family. In a profile of Peters published in New York magazine, Sarah Schulman wondered if the novel’s accessibility would signal the end, rather than the beginning, of a period in which trans literature has flourished. Those concerned about the death of counterculture and the flattening ...”