“... However, when it was revealed that the Democrats’ vice-presidential nominee for 1972, Senator Thomas Eagleton of Missouri, had been treated for depression, Sargent Shriver, who was married to Edward Kennedy’s sister Eunice, replaced Eagleton as George McGovern’s running mate. The Shrivers’ daughter Maria was later First Lady of California as the ...”

“... of pebbles, gravel and sand within them, and they themselves were the grinding agents that created more of the same. The distances these stones travelled were huge: pebbles on the beach may originally have been pieces of a rock hundreds or even thousands of miles away (these are known as erratics). In a photograph taken in the early 1970s on Dunwich beach, I ...”

“... in early December 1983. He was 73 and it was less than a year before he died of cancer, a little more than a year after he learned that there was no treatment for his particular neoplasm. I heard him furtively, or not so furtively, whingeing to someone on the phone, to a woman. (I had returned to the small West Virginia town where my parents lived and where ...”

“... him office, and so good-hearted that the rumour could get about that Radicalism was really nothing more than a misplaced desire to tease. John Wilkes met all these criteria, and was therefore much loved. Peter Thomas has produced the first serious study of Wilkes for some years. This neglect is surprising, in that Wilkes was ...”

“... and suggest that an accurate account of morality and its role in life will not be simple. Thomas Scanlon’s understanding of this complexity and of its sources in the variety of human relations and values is one of the virtues of this illuminating book. To say that it is long awaited would be an understatement. Scanlon has been one of the most ...”

“... corner from the Maison Empereur, in a quarter named after aristocratic diplomats, the Noailles. More commonly known as the belly of Marseille, this was where the land once hoovered up what had arrived by sea, not just from other Mediterranean ports, but from the barge traffic of the Rhône, and where all the merchandise was put into shops and warehouses, or ...”

“... museum this summer for a scrap of cloth from one of Marie-Antoinette’s dresses, which Chantal Thomas mentions in her lively and imaginative examination of the public personae of the French Queen. This fragment of cloth was carried to the scaffold, she says, by Barnave, who was first seen as an extreme revolutionary but later became an adviser to the ...”

“... locations where the killings took place. But the true crime genre has a much longer lineage. More than four centuries ago a series of plays closely based on real murder cases appeared on the London stage. Their literary quality is variable – they tend to melodrama and moralising, and indeed to misogyny (they often feature murderous wives) – but some ...”

“... and function of hotels. After his world-beating Freudian serve with The White Hotel here is D.M. Thomas again, standing on the baseline at the start of his new novel in yet another hotel setting. The Soviet poet, Rozanov, is sharing his bed with a blind woman whom he has arranged to meet because he fancies a literally blind date, and she is a fervent admirer ...”

“... and left to gather dust’. It won’t come as a surprise that the misfits turn out to be rather more useful than the Park reckoned, and invariably end up antiheroes of the hour before the story’s done. Their stock complaint that nothing ever happens at Slough House, that they never get to do any real intelligence work, is less convincing with every ...”

“... were once reluctant to speak of a rat’s ‘hunger’, but this was because agreement is more forthcoming as to how long it is since an animal was last fed than on how hungry it is. Similarly, those experimenters who used the number of faecal boluses excreted by a rat as an index of its degree of fearfulness were not denying the reality of the ...”

“... story about Marlowe’s origins in Canterbury and his doings at Corpus in Cambridge, and a rather more realistic take on Marlowe’s life. But where he claims ‘a close, unromantic alertness to politics and religion, as well as to explicit facts about individuals’, I am not too convinced. The book is full of minor errors on both points. Faversham is not ...”

“... a transparent liquid, first viscous and sluggish, like a jelly of meaning, then ever thinner and more mobile, flowing faster and faster until it reached me at the speed of thinking and I could not entirely distinguish the suggestions it was making from my own thoughts. I had undergone the acceleration into the written word that you also experience as a ...”

“... The​ Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables, Florida is enormous. So is its pool, which you could say is more of a lake. When Madonna stayed there in the early 1990s, she apparently insisted on having the pool to herself, less for the swimming perhaps, and more because as a material goddess she could ...”

“... It looks​ , for now, more than 11 weeks after the inconclusive general election, as though Italy is about to have a new government. On Friday, 18 May, the Movimento 5 Stelle and the Lega Nord published the text of a coalition agreement, signed by their respective leaders, Luigi Di Maio and Matteo Salvini, and overwhelmingly approved by the members of both parties ...”