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“... up against their will or inclination in the steady expansion of the Empire. Take the case of Sarah Shade, an agricultural servant from Herefordshire who, in 1769, fled to India with her stepfather (who may also have been her lover). She found herself the only woman on board a ship carrying East India Company soldiers, to one of whom her stepfather tried ...”

“... Dinner in 20 minutes when Daddy gets home.” Max replies instantly. “I ate with Sarah and Penelope already. Bye.” ’ There is something eerie about the joke and Andersen’s humour is often dark; his characters can seem uncomfortable not only with the shape of things to come, but with a future that arrived too soon. ‘Do other people get ...”

“... thought not much different from the Tories. The only MP who appears to have understood that was Sarah Teather (Brent Central) who was sacked from her ministerial post and decided not to stand again. Unsurprisingly, having reneged on their manifesto promise to scrap tuition fees, the Lib Dems lost wherever students bothered to vote. The Lib Dem collapse in ...”

“... in the annual exhibition of the Royal Academy, which wasn’t founded until after Hogarth’s death. They are mostly ‘friendship portraits’. Hogarth painted Benjamin Hoadly, for example, at least three times. He was a physician, a mathematician, an FRS from the age of twenty, and the author of a comedy, The Suspicious Husband, that was a staple in the ...”

“... to work through. Consider the terrible outbreak of plague in the 14th century known as the Black Death. Europe suffered disproportionately, losing perhaps 50 per cent of its total population. One result of this, however, was that the living standards and wages of many of those who survived seem to have improved. This, it has been suggested, led in time to a ...”

“... and feeling is happening internally? What does that mean for the possibility – the duty, as Sarah Schulman calls it in her book Conflict Is Not Abuse – of repair?Something else happened in 2000. In a review of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, James Wood coined the phrase ‘hysterical realism’ to describe a trend. Novels like Smith’s and Wallace’s ...”

“... his wife into a parent – strict but merciful, the custodian of his best self. Since Clark’s death last year, his widow has paid tribute to his sensitive prowess as an adulterer. He caused her much pain, she has confessed, but never quite too much. Bully for him, then, so to speak. In his introduction to the first volume of his Diaries, Clark claimed ...”

“... would call it a roll of honour. From recent years, it would include Clive Ponting, Cathy Massiter, Sarah Tisdall and Katharine Gun. Norton-Taylor seems to have known them all. Most of his best stories, however, came from the numerous civil servants, some of them very senior, who used a discreet journalist to reveal that government was up to something morally ...”

“... who starred in Hollywood’s first feature-length partial-talkie – the movie which sounded the death knell for silent cinema – is himself a historical monument ‘condensing into a single figure the structures of white supremacist racial integration that built the United States: black labour in the realm of production, inter-racial nurture and sex (the ...”

“... the centrality of Osborne’s influence on the generations that followed. Following Osborne’s death in 1994, however, David Hare, among others, leaped to the playwright’s defence, in his memorial eulogy and a longer lecture first delivered in 2002 and repeated on the stage of the Royal Court on the 50th anniversary of Look Back in Anger’s opening. Now ...”

“... The hat, however, suggests to the adult Aurora, by now a poet with an interest in tragedy, the death of Aeschylus, who according to legend was killed when a circling eagle or vulture, mistaking his bald pate for a rock, dropped a tortoise on it from a great height in order to crack open its shell. Perhaps the beginnings of this thought had struck the young ...”

“... ill on arrival that ‘the Captain had fears of her dropping off his hands, without Emolument by death.’ Susanna Wheatley had recently lost a daughter of around Phillis’s age; there’s some speculation that she imagined the child as a replacement.In an essay of 1983, Alice Walker writes of her grief for ‘this sickly, frail Black girl’ whose ...”

“... whether Kennedy would drop Johnson from the ticket the following year, which would have been the death of his political ambitions. Kennedy always denied it and there is no evidence that he ever discussed the possibility with his advisers. But as Caro points out, this hardly settles the matter. Kennedy had shown himself Johnson’s equal in ruthlessness and ...”

“... bang in the middle of Lichfield, in September 1709, the elder son of Michael Johnson and his wife, Sarah, rather old and very proud parents. They had, Johnson recalled, ‘not much happiness from each other’, and immediately deposited their ambitions in him. Michael, the son of a labourer, had had the rare good luck to receive a charity school education and ...”

“... A few months before his early death from tuberculosis, John Keats scribbled these lines in his papers: This living hand, now warm and capable Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold And in the icy silence of the tomb, So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood So in my veins red life might stream again, And thou be conscience-calm’d – see, here it is I hold it towards you ...”