“... a mistress in a Liverpool slum. Episodes describing the boy’s retrieval by his father after his mother dies in abject poverty frame a story otherwise set largely in postwar Britain, about the children of an inter-racial marriage, one of whom goes missing. (The story’s primary historical context is the Moors murders of the 1960s.) Phillips is well aware ...”

“... popular Reformation novels were also too keen to pick sides. They cannot match the Fifth Queen trilogy of his contemporary Ford Madox Ford, whose fading Catholicism impelled him to explore the dark passages between faith and power in the reign of Henry VIII.Neither Rolfe nor Benson’s brands of sensationalism ...”

“... in Belfast, was shot dead by the IRA while off duty. For more than thirty years, Andy and his mother, Martha, have been waiting for the British state to properly investigate Tony’s murder. For most of that time they have felt completely alone in their endeavour. In May 2022, legislation was making its way through Parliament that made it more likely than ...”

“... with her family. Marten’s paternal grandmother, Mary Anna Sturt Marten, was a goddaughter of the QueenMother; George VI attended her wedding. Marten’s father had been a page to Queen Elizabeth II. The papers ran ...”

“... of the playwright Lillian Hellman, whom Edmund Wilson would describe in his journals as the queen bee of the Martha’s Vineyard ‘cocktail belt’, Styron and Rose would become champion party-throwers themselves up in Roxbury, Connecticut, between work-slogs. But by the year of Kazin’s Christmas report, the ...”

“... Caligula and Nero, he had a weakness for horrible women: his last wife, Agrippina, Nero’s mother, set about getting her son the throne by poisoning Claudius once he had adopted Nero. After Nero came to power he murdered Claudius’ son Britannicus; and then, before he was 16, Nero married Claudius’ daughter Octavia. Thus the pathetic Octavia was ...”

“... of background Channon yearned for: a Nicolson baronetcy had been created by Charles I, and on his mother’s side he was related to the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava. Where some people reinvent themselves to disguise a lowly upbringing, Channon tried desperately to shed his origins as the son of a rich shipowner – ‘I have put my whole life’s force into ...”

“... she got to know the other young mothers. As well as befriending Naseem she was close to another mother from the tower, Munira, who lived on the fifth floor. It was a strong Muslim community: many were from the Middle East, but a sizeable number were from Morocco, and some of the local boys referred to Grenfell Tower as ‘the Moroccan flats’. ‘It was ...”