“... against all known laws of physics, and we have a moment where we hear all his thoughts as Death clogs his failing body through space and time. There. Done. The Pale King never needed to happen, nor all the rest of it. Though there is one thing we wouldn’t want to lose: a character named Mr Bussy. That’s how I felt before I read ...”

“... after my father had died. He had made tyrannical demands of her in his last years, so that his death came to her as a liberation. She could watch television without constantly being interrupted by shouts from his bedroom to make him a cup of tea; she was free to immerse herself in reading the great Russian novels and writing a book of her own, a series of ...”

“... Obama’s chief spokesman on the politics of the region, had met with Stevens shortly before his death to discuss how America could help rebuild Libya’s higher education system (it’s hard to think of anything that would be more of a red rag to the bull of the alt-right than that idea). He soon got caught up in the madness that followed. It became the ...”

“... on his friends (including Wordsworth), on the Wedgwoods, and on his pupils, and was courting Sarah Wedgwood and the £25,000 which went with her. Hazlitt once again (and this time he could have had Wordsworth’s loan to Montagu in mind): ‘A member of the ideal and perfect commonwealth of letters lends another a hundred pounds for immediate and ...”

“... his work, notably the Ford Lectures on The Nobility of Later Medieval England published after his death. However, through his teaching and lecturing and the supervision of a large number of graduate students who then went on to greater things, he was undoubtedly the leading medieval historian of his time. A perfectionist in both his research and writing he ...”

“... intellectually ambitious woman without an enlightened father might adopt what the historian Sarah Gwyneth Ross calls a ‘filial persona’ to secure support without scandal – and it required all the genuflection one might expect. ‘I commit myself to your boundless dignity, wisdom and authority,’ Isotta Nogarola wrote to the celebrated humanist ...”

“... for many people around the world, expressing themselves as they wished meant risking death.’ In 2007, Kellie Telesford, a trans woman from Trinidad, was murdered on Thornton Heath. Telesford’s 18-year-old killer was acquitted on the grounds that Telesford may have died from a consensual sex game that went wrong or may have inflicted the fatal ...”

“... well as massive damage to infrastructure. What if anything has Libya got in exchange for all the death and destruction that have been visited on it over the past seven and a half months? The overthrow of Gaddafi & Co was far from being a straightforward revolution against tyranny, but the West’s latest military intervention can’t be debunked as being ...”

“... contain epidemics. On 14 April, he froze US funding for the organisation.At the end of March, the death tolls in China and the US were about the same, a little above three thousand. Two weeks later, when Trump was claiming in the Rose Garden that China and the WHO between them had raised the worldwide caseload by a factor of twenty, the number of dead in ...”

“... to have achieved notoriety as America’s best-known Marxist in the years of the Soviet Union’s death throes, when Marxism of any kind was held to be empirically disproved and indelibly tainted with mass murder. Moreover, his particular commitments went considerably beyond an axiomatic materialism in which economic conditions necessarily carve out whatever ...”

“... and on this side of the Atlantic it was often republished, alongside Moore’s song about Sarah Curran, from the fourth book of Irish Melodies, there known simply by its opening words, ‘She is far from the land’, but now more defiantly identified as ‘The Betrothed of Robert Emmet’. Over the last twenty years, a reviewer of the final volumes of ...”

“... When Habiba withdrew from him, Onyango turned to other women, including the one who became ‘Mama Sarah’, a surrogate grandmother to the president. He also took to beating Habiba. One night, after he nearly killed her, she fled to her family in Kolonde. Barack and his sister were heartbroken. They walked 100 miles to try to get her back. She refused. The ...”

“... rule is limited. We still don’t know whether or not Nefertiti was his mother, or what caused his death at the age of nineteen, or what drove him to reverse his father’s decision to worship the god Aten, a sun deity, and return Egyptians to the cult of Amun. Gabolde was eager to decipher any clues the decree might hold and applied to the Louvre Abu Dhabi as ...”

“... from leaving a shelter long enough to get an abortion? Kavanaugh’s decision in that case was the death knell for Roe. The gov jocks were now our rulers.Ford became an academic psychologist. She wrote her dissertation on the coping mechanisms of children. The coping mechanisms of children haven’t historically appeared in newspapers. They have appeared in ...”

“... also perversely destructive of herself and others, no longer a valiant survivor. She freezes to death on a winter’s night, having driven away anyone who might care for her. Both characters were refractions of Maggie, the woman Roth married in 1959 after she had claimed to be pregnant. He agreed to marry her on condition that she have an immediate ...”