“... election a few weeks later and dominated French politics for the next twenty years. For those born, like me, in the late 1970s it seemed to be the natural party of government.The guilt instilled by the result of 21 April 2002 helped the PS retain a significant role for another decade. Relentless warnings about the dangers of dispersing left-wing votes and ...”

“... and there are many more.’ It’s these other tones which are missing in The Ice-Pilot Speaks. Anne Stevenson compares Stainer to Emily Dickinson, but she reminds me more of Edith Sitwell, particularly the Sitwell of Façade, not in terms of rhythm (which Sitwell used quite skilfully and Stainer hardly uses at all) but in terms of emotional range and ...”

“... of the modern poet: an attempt to transform childhood unhappiness into literary success. He was born in Garrettsville, Ohio in 1899 to parents who were, as the editors of the letters put it, ‘prosperous, ambitious and ill-matched’. The family moved to Cleveland, as his father’s business became increasingly successful, and the couple divorced when ...”

“... of a creature, battling and winning through against the forces of darkness, like Jane Eyre, like Anne of Green Gables, like Elizabeth I. Read Oranges now and you will still find in it the exuberance and the craft of a jack-in-the-box. There is so much energy stowed away in those neat, demure little sentences. It will leap out and cuff you hard. You can feel ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... human observation and contrivance’ – and the pain and disorder of her often very messy life. Born in 1911, Bishop was effectively orphaned as a small child: her father died before she was one; in 1916, when Bishop was five, her mother was committed to a sanitorium in Nova Scotia, dying there in 1934, the year Bishop graduated from Vassar. Bishop was ...”

“... and my fortress’. He has a ‘people aborning’ (22) where the KJ has a ‘people that shall be born’, and a ‘sojourner’ (94) for the KJ’s ‘stranger’. The KJ’s ‘I have considered the days of old’ (77) is now ‘I ponder the days of yore.’ And the famous line ‘I have been young and now am old’ (37) has been turned into ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... II, on whose death in 1488 the duchy was absorbed into France with the marriage of his daughter Anne to two successive Valois kings. It was there, in rather obscure circumstances, that Henri IV issued the famous edict which brought the Wars of Religion to a close. There, too, the young Louis XIV staged the arrest of Fouquet, the overmighty minister he ...”