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“... dates: the Mona Lisa, another female portrait, La Belle Ferronnière, Virgin and Child with St Anne, the first version of Virgin of the Rocks and St John the Baptist. A new insight into his activity was provided by the publication in 1651 of his so-called Treatise on Painting, a work produced after his death by combining different passages from his ...”

“... February 2024, an exhibition about her life and work opened in Vienna, the city in which she was born. Segal’s final story appeared in the New Yorker on 7 October, the day that she died, aged 96. Her daughter and her son’s partner had taken dictation.Those who know Segal’s work are familiar with the story of her childhood, what she called, with some ...”

“... Romantic, he was also repeatedly mocked for his arriviste pretensions (a bricklayer’s son, born John Soan, he added the more dignified final ‘e’ when he was setting up practice in the early 1780s), for his ludicrous irascibility (one of his standard responses to criticism was to issue a libel writ) and for the perversity of his architectural ...”

“... advisers and entrenched suspicion among people who doubt his resolve. By recognising Palestine, Anne Tuaillon, the disconsolate president of France-Palestine Solidarity, told the press, France could have sent a strong signal to Israel and the world. It would have been ‘a vital stage in the resolution of the conflict’, according to Salman el-Herfi, the ...”

“... East would soon end. A week before her fifteenth birthday, after hearing about the D-Day attacks, Anne Frank wrote in her diary that ‘hope is revived within us; it gives us fresh courage, and makes us strong again.’ But as spring turned to summer, it became clear that the Allied landings wouldn’t stop the hunt for Jews in Western Europe. On the ...”

“... comparable to that of Shakespeare and Spinoza (though probably more as foil than as model). Lady Anne Monson, the British botanist of Indian plants, toasted Linnaeus as ‘king of all the realms of nature’ before raising her glass to George III, who was king merely of Britain and Ireland.Until his eyesight failed him in old age, he prided himself on being ...”

“... to tell me about his family history a glint appeared in Jim’s eye. ‘My grandfather George was born in 1860,’ he said, ‘and he worked as a butcher and a restaurant owner up in London, near St Paul’s. My father was Arch Fordham and he started a farm in Berkshire, but my mother, Elsie, who was born in 1901, her ...”

“... did. When I turned to the Irish census records I could quite easily find John Beegan, who was born in 1868, the eldest child of John and Jane Beegan. In 1901 they were living together with the younger Beegans, Mary and Thomas, at 23 Dunlo Hill in Ballinasloe. On the census form, John Beegan senior describes himself and his two sons, John Leo and ...”

“... maturity,’ Judith Thurman wrote in her 1999 biography. Colette neglected her only daughter, born in 1913, when she was married to her second husband, Henry de Jouvenel, though she had plenty of time for Henry’s son from his first marriage, Bertrand, whom she seduced in 1920, when he was sixteen.Is Gigi the reason English-speaking readers don’t much ...”

“... wished for a boy – a wish that was even more evident when her sister Hélène, or Poupette, was born. Two days a week she went to a private Catholic school, Le Cours Désir (her mother’s influence), and she liked reading more than anything else (her father’s). ‘I was a madly gay little girl,’ she writes, though what I noticed most in her description ...”

“... may be a trans man or identify as non-binary.Recently, in Sweden, for the first time a baby was born to a woman whose pregnancy was made possible by transplanting her mother’s uterus into her body – the baby gestated in the same womb that had gestated the baby’s mother. In 2018, in Brazil, for the first time a baby was ...”

“... that deal directly with life and death struggles in colonial Africa.Marguerite Sarah Ducados was born in 1929 in the Gers, in south-west France, where her mother worked as a maid. Her father was a black Frenchman from Guadeloupe, who died when she was young. She was one of four children in a single-parent family and spent periods in an orphanage. By the ...”

“... in case de Staël’s vengeance should light on them. Meanwhile, he appealed to his generous aunt, Anne de Nassau, to write to de Staël, begging her to give him his freedom. ‘He has been weak enough to put up with that servitude out of consideration for the pain you claim to be suffering and your histrionic grief,’ Madame de Nassau wrote. It was a good ...”

“... her famous journey to Hail in Nejd (northern Arabia), unvisited by a European woman since Lady Anne Blunt had been there in 1878. She went to seek respite from her passionate but unconsummated love affair with Richard Doughty-Wylie (nephew of the great explorer Charles Doughty), whom she had met when he was British Consul in Konya. Doughty-Wylie was ...”

“... tang of the hot dog and pizza concession under the hot yellow lights.’‘One’, the Princess Anne pronoun, is a rare visitor to contemporary literary prose, not only because of its air of neutral authority – it’s just the sort of thing that makes the editorial blue pencil itch. By disowning subjectivity it more or less disqualifies itself, yet ...”