“... off to Constantinople on a steamer – the kind of modern vessel he opposed till the day of his death several decades later.The painter, David Wilkie, had been prescribed foreign travel by his doctor, as a remedy for what sounds like depression. He was a Scotsman who’d risen from poverty and, in the early part of the century, became a great favourite of ...”

“... Apartheid’s Chief Killer (2003), a book of interviews with Eugene de Kock, the apartheid death squad leader who was called ‘Prime Evil’ by his own men. The day after she first shook his hand, she woke up to find that she could not lift her right forearm, which had gone completely numb, ‘as if my body were rejecting a foreign organ ...”

“... or longing: in his mother’s lifetime James used to call a gay chatline, realising only after her death that since she paid the premium charges on the phone bill she must have known what he was doing, while Mungo availed himself of Ha-Ha’s pornography, once guiltily ironing the pages to smooth out the creases made when he folded female anatomies out of ...”

“... Just that – all in a rush, all in a preternaturally silly little voice. Instant self-imposed death sentence: one’s inner Devil Girl (fangs filed down, claws tucked away) has suddenly gone dopey and shy. SORRYMYHANDISSOCOLD! – indeed. Good luck with that. It’s true: my hands have become mottled blue-grey ice clumps during the long wait. More than 90 ...”

“... into the details of what happened next. This privilege has been embraced by others, among them, Sarah Bradford in America’s Queen (2000): ‘They would have sex in all sorts of unconventional places, aeroplanes, small boats, the beach, regardless of who might be watching or photographing. The brother of one of Jackie’s Washington friends was shocked by ...”

“... spires and towers. At about 2.6 million the population was still in recovery from the Black Death and half what it had been in 1300, but there was a general air of prosperity. London, always an exception, was densely packed with houses whose jutting upper stories made the most of tight plots at ground level; the streets were labyrinthine and public ...”

“... presence.) In many quarters Kelly was taken to task. But when Trump’s (then) press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, was asked about it, she concurred. ‘I don’t know that I’m going to get into debating the Civil War,’ she said. ‘But I do know that many historians, including Shelby Foote, in Ken Burns’s famous Civil War documentary, agree that ...”

“... one mystery: the world. Psychology is concerned with false mysteries. No one can say whether the death of my mother had an influence or not.’ And of his favourite motifs he insisted: ‘They are objects (grelots, skies, trees etc) and not “symbols”.’Magritte made exceptions to this rule, though. A hot-air balloon that once crashed near his home and a ...”

“... kids can be very good company. While I was working on this piece I opened a correspondence with Sarah Morrill, who in 2002 had published a level-headed account of Salinger’s life and thoughts on her website. (A revised version of her ‘Brief Biography’ appears in a collection of Salinger pieces called If You Really Want to Hear about It: Writers on ...”

“... would not happen at all. Marcus looking on, the lenses of his spectacles like moons. After any death, someone is doomed to live it over and over; the fact that, coming into the kitchen, he had not thrown the switch that might have saved his sister from electrocution. He is the one who finds her as she now is, as she will be. The curled lip over wet ...”

“... Petit Palais in Paris, to design a larger building, which opened in 1910, a year after Leopold’s death. The museum, which remained a monument to his imperial genius, was also a hub of ‘scientific’ endeavour and a repository for anything that the many naturalists, anthropologists, zoologists, marksmen, medics, missionaries and amateur collectors who ...”

“... this is miraculous,’ Carole Maso writes. ‘That I ploughed without illusion towards death. Even as I gave life.’ Not everyone describes birth as an encounter with death: there are ecstatic births, orgasmic births, traumatic births, and what would be traumatic for one may not be for another. How we make sense ...”

“... Couzens, a Met officer with a history of sexual misconduct, was able to abduct, rape and murder Sarah Everard in March 2021, showing his police warrant card before he handcuffed her and forced her into his car. Its remit has now been expanded: it will also look at how David Carrick, nicknamed ‘Bastard Dave’ by his colleagues in the Met, raped and ...”

“... 2015 – she attracts a more specialised admirer: history obsessives, novelists (Hilary Mantel, Sarah Waters, Madeline Miller), classicists (Robin Lane Fox, Bettany Hughes), historians (Tom Holland), who salute her muscular resurrections of the classical world, and gay men who see her as a pioneer in her writing about homosexual relationships. Along with ...”

“... Norwegian girl and a German soldier. She had been raised by her grandmother after her mother’s death from kidney disease. Frida believed her father to be dead too, until in 1977 an unexpected phone call led to a brief reunion, her half-brother having pieced together the facts from a magazine profile. Frida had herself become a teenage mother after marrying ...”