“... Charlotte Sophia chastising her son William for being ‘a true trifling character’, emigrant Anne Francis on the ants and jackals greeting colonists in South Africa, Fanny Burney on her mastectomy, two reports of witnessing executions and five different accounts of hot-air balloon voyages. There is John Addington Symonds’s description of Tennyson and ...”

“... absolutism. It is also worth asking why the decline of tragedy coincided with the waning of such power. The scholars who write in the volume on medieval tragedy are in the unenviable position of those who argue for the existence of the yeti. Such tragedy has long been thought not to exist, partly because the Christian faith which informs the period is ...”

“... descendants remained powerful property-owners, was in some accounts an incarnation of tyrannical power and in others a justly acquitted victim of an insubordinate servant. In Miriam Coles Harris’s The Sutherlands, an 1860 novel with abolitionist leanings, Anna loses her candles, her howlings and her ghostly cow and becomes a slave with mixed African and ...”

“... of a kind of ‘benign’ piracy, operated by family and/or friends: specifically, on the part of Anne Shakespeare herself, acting through her brother William Hathaway – who would then be, as transmitter of the manuscript, the ‘Mr W.H.’ thanked by the publisher.* But the inclusion of ‘A Lover’s Complaint’ at the end of the 1609 collection has ...”

“... introduced in order to clarify the work’s intricate design. In her Cambridge edition from 2014, Anne Fernald established that, as befits a work originally known as ‘The Hours’, there were meant to be twelve sections. Mendelson provides an extensive note on the text which sifts the evidence for his choices. It’s hard to imagine that any future editor ...”

“... began her reign in 1837, she followed a line of Hanoverian men, who had occupied the throne since Anne, the last queen regnant, had died in 1714. By the early decades of the 19th century, the younger generation of royal males had largely forfeited public sympathy. George IV, William IV, the Duke of York (who was Victoria’s father) and the Duke of Cumberland ...”

“... part of the book) gathers together a coven of Gossips, Old Wives, Sybils, Mother Goose, Saint Anne, Little Red Riding Hood’s Granny and the Queen of Sheba. Inside the frame, ‘The Tales’ (the second half) casts a feminist gaze over Cinderella (aka Donkeyskin), Sleeping Beauty, Bluebeard’s wives, the Beast’s Beauty, the Little Mermaid and the ...”

“... to be identified with the product. Even the Spice Girls turned them down – so much for girl power. But then, Johnson & Johnson, best known for baby powder and No More Tears shampoo, didn’t even want its own name used in Stayfree advertising. Americans may no longer believe, as they once did, that menstruating women can spoil meat, but they still see ...”

“... as a rush’ and, when finally they do have sex, they have it without role-playing, hierarchy, power imbalances or gender-bending. For all its quaint sexual vocabulary, the narrative is explicit enough to satisfy the curiosity of even the most demanding gay male reader: the boys are versatile. O’Neill’s elaborate periodisation, in other words, does not ...”

“... of usurpation and regicide haunted his short reign, and he spent most of his fourteen years in power putting down one conspiracy after another. A prophet had predicted that Henry would die in Jerusalem, where he hoped to go on pilgrimage to expiate his sins. Instead, he died in the Jerusalem Chamber of Westminster Abbey in 1413, aged 45. He had written a ...”

“... obtained only 6 per cent of the vote. At the 2022 election, its candidate, the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, was obliterated, with less than 2 per cent. In France there are no natural parties of government.The collapse of the PS vote enabled Emmanuel Macron to win the 2017 and 2022 elections. A former adviser to and minister under Hollande, Macron never ...”

“... it. Her art becomes recognisable when her crisply social novels take on a formidable and elusive power of suggestion: the prosaic grew poetic in them, and the poetic grew hard. The chief medium for these continual transactions of inner and outer was her vital irony. When Jane Austen said that she depended on her readers’ ingenuity, she meant something not ...”

“... of their education made it easy for men to sneer at their mental capacity. They were kept from power and from the control of money, and then ignored since their province did not include these important areas of life. That they were inferior was obvious from the Fall. A good supralapsarian Calvinist could not actually claim that, but for Eve, Adam would ...”

“... others by fellow-travellers at the heart of the British Establishment. What a crime for a great power to occupy a small nation and rule it along authoritarian lines! Yes, indeed, but for Soviet imperialism to stand out in its full iniquity, it is just as well to omit all reference to British or American imperialism – or, if pushed, to describe them as ...”

“... Scottish notion of a General Assembly appeared an entirely unwarrantable encroachment on sovereign power. Watching the extent to which the English failed so much as to realise the Scots had this idea, we realise how well Thomas Cromwell had done his work, and how important it is that he never had a Scottish counterpart. In what must have been a remarkably ...”