“... egotists or – if they are any good in bed – deemed ‘Latin’ lovers. Sex may be enjoyable but it ‘oh, it MUST mean something!’ Promiscuity is morally dangerous; being left ‘on the shelf’ even worse. Marriage is still the ultimate goal: ‘I’d tackle it as a full-time job demanding all my intelligence and wit and charm. I’d ...”

“... a white nightgown, your hair fallen long’, with her young Italian lover (to whom she may or may not have been married) and their one-year-old son. All three died when they were swept overboard in a storm after an agonising 12-hour wait for rescue when their ship foundered on a sand bar within sight of shore at ...”

“... your cast-offs has become a form of research, and, if you have shopped wisely, your archive may deserve an exhibition of its own. A professor of drama at Columbia has just donated 193 pieces to the Perry Ellis archive at the Fashion Institute of Technology. ‘Traditionally most designers did not think of archiving their careers,’ Valerie Steele, the ...”

“... by the Franks in 798, though another contemporary annalist puts the figure at 2901. But warfare may not be the appropriate context in which to assess the plausibility of the figure 4500. The massacre at Verden has to be understood as a political event. It would be better perhaps to compare the victims not to battlefield casualties but to hostages or ...”

“... keys to the safes, so that the most valuable items survived the raid. I reached the museum on 10 May, as part of a National Geographic group of Mesopotamian archaeologists. I was also a member of a Unesco fact-finding team, the rest of whom arrived in Baghdad several days later, having had difficulty getting permission to enter the country at all. In the ...”

“... the heroic challengers of the system who rejected socialism and Soviet values, may find the combination surprising. But both the socialist commitment and the belief in reform were crucial to the collective identity of Zubok’s people. When they lost the first and were disappointed in the second after 1968, the whole imagined community ...”

“... but the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763 and the huge expansion of Britain’s empire may have made them increasingly visible. The black presence raised questions about what it meant to have such an empire, one composed of peoples of different ethnicities and religious beliefs. A number of cases of enslaved African men and women who had escaped ...”

“... individuals, representatives of their elected and traditional authorities did not take part. In May 2021 an agreement was reached between the two countries. According to the joint declaration, Germany said it was ready to recognise its ‘moral responsibility for the colonisation of Namibia’ and to apologise ‘for the historic developments that led to ...”

“... Certain doomed spirits from the 16th century continue to haunt us and beguile us. On 21 May 1940 Nancy Mitford wrote to Evelyn Waugh on the subject:I used to masturbate whenever I thought about Lady Jane Grey so of course I thought about her constantly and even executed a fine watercolour of her on the scaffold, which my mother still has, framed, and in which Lady Jane and her ladies-in-waiting all wear watches hanging from enamel bows, as my mother did at the time … I still get quite excited when I think of Lady Jane (less and less often as the years roll on ...”

“... readable because animated by all of Grigson’s brilliant erudition and spirit of advocacy. Lord David Cecil’s long chapter in his 1969 book Visionary and Dreamer: Two Poetic Painters (the other one is Burne-Jones) is a more languid affair, but it usefully brought Cecil’s own Romantic instincts to bear on a painter whose inspiration was often professedly ...”

“... exes are a hard-publishing lot. So far we have had diaries from two of its central figures, David Blunkett and Alastair Campbell, and from a spin-doctor hanger-on (Lance Price); a memoir by its most senior diplomat, the former ambassador to Washington Sir Christopher Meyer; and now memoirs by the former prime minister’s wife, his deputy and his ...”

“... of Cesky Krumlov, seat of the powerful Rozmberk family. It was at this inn, on the evening of 3 May 1591, that the English alchemist, clairvoyant and con-man Edward Kelley was arrested by officers of Emperor Rudolf II. At the time of his arrest Kelley was an internationally famous figure, but thereafter the story grows confused: he disappears from view into ...”

“... pages, of which only the first 93 have previously been printed. Lawrence wrote the book between May 1920, when he had just finished The Lost Girl, and some time in 1921. He gave up working on Mr Noon in order to dash off the travel book Sea and Sardinia, and was at the same time writing Aaron’s Rod. He had trouble finishing both the novels: Aaron’s Rod ...”

“... from the near town ... And yet this is the poet who quotes with solemn approval: Beauty it may be is the meet of lines, Or careful-spacèd sequences of sound. Well, to be sure: but what happens to ‘the meet of lines’ at ‘wheelbarrow/paths’, and ‘but/out’ and ‘were/barred’? Grigson’s precepts are often admirable, but they are ...”

“... it in that dawn to be reading Tel Quel and watching the signs that led up to les événements of May ’68. Sollers was among the chief theorists of that ‘moment’, along with Barthes and Derrida. It is not hard to see the connection between these essays and a text like Barthes’s S/Z, where the scientistic dream of a structuralist ‘method’ is ...”