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“... court in Avignon in the 1330s, he met Petrarch, who asked him to paint a portrait of his beloved Laura. Petrarch was so pleased with the painting, which doesn’t survive, that he wrote a sonnet for Simone: ‘But Simone must have been in Paradise … saw her there, and portrayed her in paint/to give us proof here of such loveliness.’ Such work, Petrarch ...”

“... I felt. I was curious, mostly, about the rats and snakes: How big were they? Were they black or brown? But I don’t remember caring about how he felt. I was 13 and I wanted my new fantasy life to begin. But at the time, there seemed little chance I would become anything but a criminal, too. I was doing badly at school, taking any kind of pill on offer in ...”

“... yet ‘monstrous “belle”’ (Craig McDean); ‘powerful’ yet ‘vulnerable’ (Laura Collins); ‘unobtainable’ yet ‘accessible’ (Collins again). Or to quote the photographer David Bailey: ‘She’s the kind of girl you wished lived next door, but she’s never going to.’ Many of these descriptions – perfect yet ...”

“... But the Treasury can hardly be accused of being self-deceived by acting in this way: Gordon Brown is not like those 16th-century Spanish monarchs who insisted that the interest payments on their debts should be left off their accounts because they found it too demeaning to be reminded of them. Brown is attempting to ...”

“... Mrs Stanford White, is perversely known as ‘Grandma’, while her grand-mother, Laura Chanler, is ‘Mama’. ‘Mama’ married Stanford White’s son Lawrence (‘Papa’). So ‘Mama’ and ‘Papa’ are Lessard’s grandparents. They had eight children, one of whom is Lessard’s mother – referred to as ‘my mother’. Her father is ...”

“... The Victorians revelled in it. Stephen Foster’s audience grieved for Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair, the lost one ‘who comes not again’. The big Romantics all had their more portentous versions, from Lucy ceasing to be, to Shelley’s solipsistic sad heart, filled with grief ‘but with delight/No more, oh nevermore’. Poe’s sardonic raven ...”

“... earliest diaries are the worst. ‘Very foggy all morning, and we did not go out. Stella went to Laura, and was away for luncheon and tea. We lunched at 1, and afterwards went to the Zoo, bussing to Park Lane, and then to Baker St.’ ‘Father and I went for a walk after breakfast’; ‘I did not go out with father in the morning because he had a ...”

“... children’s books. Her poems have been collected and admirably annotated by Stuart Curran at the Brown University Women Writers Project. The edition gathers together all the Elegiac Sonnets that appeared in the 1780s and 1790s, and two longish blank verse poems, ‘The Emigrants’ and ‘Beachy Head’, as well as animal fables and occasional verse more ...”

“... View of Life, ‘the blue of their linen shorts and the pale mauve of their shirts accenting the brown splendour of their bodies; and down by the sea many of them spend half their days naked and unrebuked.’ On other writers, Forster’s letters are illuminating, but it’s hard to know how truthful he is, and how willing to bend the truth for someone’s ...”

“... the Islamic vigilantes attached to the Ministry of the Interior, who tour the city in brown jeeps, harassing inadequately covered women and anyone who fails to observe the hours of prayer. Investigations into the second bomb remain even more obscure: there have been many arrests in areas suspected of fundamentalist influence, both Sunni and ...”

“... suggested by the triangle of muddy green flannel shirt above it is counteracted by his muddy brown tie. He even has a gun, properly broken, in the crook of his arm. Tony’s invitation is not just friendliness, of course, a bit of that country hospitality which makes people rush round to greet you after you’ve been there a few years. He has a few ...”

“... Koestenbaum, Gertrude Stein, George Oppen, Robin D.G. Kelley, Judith Butler, Fred Moten and Wendy Brown. In as far as this amorphous work can be defined, On Freedom is an example of a recent genre that takes as its subject the phenomenon of mass scolding on the left – you could call it ‘cancel culture’, though she doesn’t – and makes a plea for a ...”

“... a self-described ‘prunaholic and a horndog’. (Prison wine is called ‘pruno’.) There is Laura Lipp, the only other white woman in the unit besides Romy, a loopy committer of infanticide who compares herself to Medea. Sammy Fernandez, Romy’s closest friend, is the child of an addict and has spent a lifetime in and out of institutions, beginning ...”

“... be a showcase for American generosity. It was a joint venture of Bechtel and Project Hope, one of Laura Bush’s favourite charities, overseen by USAID. Congressional Democrats questioned whether Iraq needed a state of the art 94-bed paediatric unit when existing hospitals were in dire need of basic repairs and medical supplies. The contract was signed ...”

“... which is a sign of how vivid the early traumas remain. She likes both Hillary Clinton and Laura Bush, and resents Downing Street’s failure to make better use of her as an ‘asset’, but doesn’t notice that the two presidential wives have a clarity to their respective roles that she never seeks in her own. She eventually sees through Carole ...”