“... necessarily treated as a national resource. Such a development is wholeheartedly welcomed by the born-again founders of Gilead, for whom, as Offred’s Commander puts it, ‘Nature’s norm’ has reasserted itself. Offred was allowed to choose between becoming a handmaid and joining the clean-up squads of slave labourers in the outlying regions made ...”

“... reveals that he does indeed have all of Hardy’s consciousness in his head, and that he was born exactly a hundred years after Hardy, to the very minute. Sharon thinks all this will be good for business; she changes the name of her Hampstead shop to Eustacia’s on the Heath, and hopes to persuade Barney to go on a worldwide lecture tour in the persona ...”

“... a subtler account of the making of a terrorist, you have to turn to a piece of fiction like Anne Devlin’s ‘Naming the names’.) Power sets up a proliferation of outlets for treachery and hostility. His characters, when they’re not expressing weariness, have a vicious and unengaging style of speech: ‘I say fuck you and your likes. You’re all ...”

“... Writing letters was not the work Robert Lowell thought himself born to do, but what with one thing and another – good friends, a lively mind, deep troubles – he wrote a great many of them, demonstrating at considerable length ‘the excitement of his intelligence and the liveliness of his prose’. These are the words of Saskia Hamilton, the poet who has undertaken the arduous and complicated task of editing this selection ...”

“... firmly in his material and emotional worlds.Buckingham began as ‘nobody special’, born George Villiers in Leicestershire in 1592. He was the second son of Sir George Villiers, a successful sheep farmer, and his second wife, Mary. There was property, but little prospect of a courtly career. Mary, however, was ‘pushy’, and knew she had a ...”

“... knowing herself to be a witness to a monstrous piece of history (‘I was in the same barracks as Anne Frank. Of course, I didn’t know who she was then. There were just some Dutch girls. They cried all the time.’) Watching the VJ Day commemorations brought it back. ‘I saw those old men, Japanese prisoners of war, and I thought: you shouldn’t ...”

“... independent South American countries’. Inflamed by letters from his sister in England, Miss Anne, he embarks on grandiose projects aimed at reinventing Europe and even improving on it. He builds a circular railway, for example, and surrounds it with crude backdrops showing the wonders of the world. As he rides on his train, admiring the painted ...”

“... In her introduction to Records of Woman, Feldman agrees with other Romanticists such as Anne Mellor and Jerome McGann that Hemans ‘defies’, ‘undercuts’ and ‘criticises’ the feminine domestic ideal she appears to represent. In other words, she emerges from the 20th century less of a lady than was previously thought, and more of a ...”

“... Thus the eventual union of the kingdoms was an odd arrangement negotiated on behalf of Queen Anne as Queen of England with herself as Queen of Scotland. The conventional English understanding of the Union of 1707 is that Scotland was incorporated within the English state by Act of Parliament, and that, in the words of the chief guru of English ...”

“... from his European travels. Private, they are entitled, white lettering on blue: ‘Solange and Anne Swinging’, ‘Hardcore Sex-Clubs in Germany’, ‘Profession: Architect’. Contraband carried through the green channel among dad’s spare shirts and samples, his belts and buckles (he traded in leather goods). The Kötting brothers avail themselves of ...”

“... disconfirmed, that this new look will help him do better justice to his subject matter.Staël was born in tsarist St Petersburg in 1914, the heir to a family of generals and higher bureaucrats in the Imperial service. His father, General Vladimir de Staël von Holstein, was vice-governor of the Fortress of St Peter and St Paul, where famous liberals had been ...”

“... the Italian she picked up in Somaliland.This is all a version of Hazzard’s own journey. She was born in Sydney in 1931, the younger of Reg and Catherine (‘Kit’) Hazzard’s two daughters. She liked to claim that her parents were Welsh and Scottish but Brigitta Olubas has uncovered hazier beginnings, including illegitimacy and uncertain birth records for ...”

“... lunkish sons, although the father was a dentist – why didn’t the wife get a job?) To the Manor Born offered a replay of old Tory values in an era of new Whiggism calling itself Tory. Penelope Keith’s character rejoiced in both assurance and widowhood. Yet she was merely a charming eccentric at bottom, one of those comic ladies, like Margaret Rutherford ...”

“... and economic migrants has risen steadily: roughly 10 per cent of the current population was born elsewhere. Ireland can now lay claim to ethnic diversity, along with some less attractive features of rampant capitalism, including a widening gap between rich and poor. And the rhetoric has changed too. For much of Ireland’s post-independence history ...”

“... surgery, so that Jay Gatsby receives the looks first of Robert Redford then Leonardo DiCaprio. Anne Hathaway’s blandly pretty mask is tied with cinematic ribbon over Jane Austen’s blurry features – a criminal defacement however photogenic the impostor. Traffic the other way, taking cinema as the basis for fiction, tends to focus on headline-grabbing ...”