“... traveller’. There were happy, outdoorsy times in upper Tweeddale, the birthplace of his mother, Helen. A cultured uncle introduced him to French novels and fly fishing, and gave him a 1621 edition of Tacitus. ‘I never went to school in the conventional sense,’ Buchan wrote, ‘for a boarding school was beyond the narrow means of my family.’ But ...”

“... just a few pages – the women in her cell tell her of their children and their drug addictions; Helen, white and Jewish, describes her estrangement from two of the other inmates, former sex-work comrades Evelyn and Rita, after the advent of black power – and in passing defends Andrea Dworkin, not for her ideas but for her courage when arrested and the ...”

“... to join ‘the chorus of mere whingers against Theory, all those mouthy conservatives from (say) Helen Gardner . . . to Roger Shattuck . . . with their romps up and down the glooming critical slopes of the Blooms, Allan and Harold’ – this is a fair sample, unfortunately, of his idea of lively prose. He accepts that post-structuralism, new ...”

“... to America. At what was effectively the mid-point of his life, he undertook his autobiography, a small book published in French as Chroniques de ma vie, whose precise authorship, like that of Stravinsky’s other prose works, has been disputed. Stravinsky’s St Petersburg friend Walter Nouvel seems to have done much of the writing, but Walsh shrewdly ...”

“... in 1962. Bucknell considers it alongside The Liverpool Scene, Edward Lucie-Smith’s short 1967 small-press anthology of ‘pop poems and interviews recorded live along the Mersey Beat’ and other works of performance verse. In retrospect, few would argue that the Mersey beat of these poets was better than the Mersey beat of the Beatles, and some might ...”

“... them to market. And the foot and mouth epidemic was wiping out herds bred over centuries in Wales. Small farmers, whelped on Common Market subsidies and John Constable idylls, were being priced out of existence by agribusiness and Tesco. In time, the three of us – Karl, Seamus and me – decided to go out there partly to see what we could see but also as a ...”

“... or insides Dickinson wrote are inscribed with the name of one of her regular correspondents – Helen Hunt Jackson, Dr J.G. Holland or his wife, Mrs Holland – making one feel that for Dickinson the decision about whether or not to send a letter she’d written could be almost as problematic as the decision about whether or not to publish her ...”

“... hearing charges against the UK’s main private provider of puberty blockers: it’s alleged that Helen Webberley inappropriately prescribed puberty blockers to young patients, sidestepping the GIDS/NHS England regulatory framework. She was suspended by the General Medical Council in 2018, but continued to practise from outside the UK.GIDS did not originate ...”

“... and that they were now landed with one as their leader. But the critics were confounded as the small-town politician readily assumed the status of a world leader who, with unusual decisiveness, put his stamp upon the post-war world. It is true that towards the end of his term there was much that could be criticised in the Truman Administration, but the ...”

“... was accomplished painlessly. Reagan began the 1950 California Senate campaign as a supporter of Helen Gahagan Douglas – slandered by her opponent, Nixon, as the ‘Pink Lady’ – but ended it as a patron of Nixon. Looking back, he would give this transition a more compelling gloss and allude darkly to the period when he had to carry a gun in ...”

“... believes, also have provided Daisy’s maiden name. Living near the Lardners were Gene and Helen Buck, whom Zelda disliked, possibly because Scott didn’t. Jordan Baker, a careless driver, may have been given the name of a popular open roadster, the Jordan. At times the connections are like a whirlpool, threatening to suck the reader under. Whom did ...”

“... or Italian’. The spread of Greek literacy in the early 16th century changed the outlook of a small but prominent group of educated women. Queen Elizabeth translated Euripides into Latin, while Lady Jane Lumley produced an English version of his Iphigenia in Aulis – the first dramatic work written by a woman in the vernacular. Tanya Pollard​ mentions ...”

“... but the subject of the piece had something unforgettable to say about what happens when a small group of men become fixated with the preservation of their own power.From her balcony, the Mouth of the South, as the very unrestrained Mitchell was known, saw palls of smoke rising each day from the centre of Washington. ‘Air pollution around here is ...”

“... day: that morning I took my uncle’s boat from the brown water cove and headed for Mosher Island. Small waves splashed against the hull and the hollow creak of oarlock and oar rose into the woods of black pine crusted with lichen. I moved like a dark star, drifting over the drowned other half of the world until, by a distant prompting, I looked over the ...”

“... the authenticity of the images of the bodies of Oscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his small daughter, Angie Valeria, who drowned trying to cross the Rio Grande. The politics of migration, which is purportedly founded on reason and utilitarian logic (the need to get numbers under control for the benefit of all), reveals itself in all its sexual ...”