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“... outset, is that it reduces the story of Europe to a pious recitation of how the European Union was born, ate its spinach and grew up to be big and strong. That version inevitably treats contemporary history east of the Elbe and south-east of Vienna as a series of bolt-ons, pausing from time to time to insert sections about the Hungarian Revolution or 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 ...”

“... eye. ‘Between the ANC and oblivion stood the lone and battered figure of Winnie Mandela,’ Anne Marie du Preez Bezdrob wrote in Winnie Mandela: A Life (2004). The pathos of individual heroism became a defining feature of Winnie Mandela’s life, but the same was true of the ANC, a moribund organisation until the freedom fighters of the Soweto ...”

“... project. The gap isn’t clearly explained. In Autumn, Knausgaard’s fourth daughter is not yet born, but by Summer Anne is talking. Autumn and Winter list months, but don’t attach a year to them. The first full date the reader is given is in the epilogue of Spring: ‘Today is Wednesday the 13th of April 2016 … and I ...”

“... about including Burns’s Scottish dialect). He included nothing medieval (none of his poets was born before the 1550s), and, after a minor tussle with Tennyson, excluded anyone who was still alive in 1861. There were no Americans or other writers from outside the British Isles. Formally, he narrowed things down, too. Though its sense of what constituted a ...”

“... Elif Batuman, Edna Bonhomme, Hazel V. Carby, Linda Colley, Meehan Crist, Anne Enright, Lorna Finlayson, Lisa Hallgarten and Jayne Kavanagh, Sophie Lewis, Maureen N. McLane, Erin Maglaque, Gazelle Mba, Azadeh Moaveni, Toril Moi, Joanne O’Leary, Niela Orr, Lauren Oyler, Susan Pedersen, Jacqueline Rose, Madeleine Schwartz, Arianne Shahvisi, Sophie Smith, Rebecca Solnit, Alice Spawls, Amia Srinivasan, Chaohua Wang, Marina Warner, Bee Wilson, Emily Witt Elif BatumanWhen​ Roe v ...”

“... excuse for favouring my sister, saying that my father had so totally appropriated me, their first-born, with his adoration that, when they had a second child, she had no alternative to loving her more than he did and more than she did me. She was so blithely innocent about normal human feelings that, all her life, when questioned about her maternal ...”

“... Field’ includes the line: ‘Robespierre and Stalin mostly killed people they knew.’ In ‘Anne Boleyn’: ‘There was a whiteness to Anne Boleyn’s throat.’The sonnets in The Dolphin are more melancholy, more hushed and personal. The iambic beat becomes less strident and mechanical; its structure is in subtle ...”

“... in his queering account of Swift, Aileen Douglas on his friendship with women poets, Rebecca Anne Barr on Swift and 18th-century masculinity, Anne Markey on Gaelic echoes in Gulliver’s Travels and Daniel Sanjiv Roberts’s placing of what was first published as Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World in ...”

“... in one chapter to Burnley, in the next to Barnsley, and poor at sums. He gives the age of Olivier, born in 1907, as 39 when he achieved his triumph as Richard III in 1944. Tarquin Olivier, born in 1936, is credited with a visit at the age of seven to Notley Abbey, bought by his father in 1945. Nor has Holden checked all the ...”

“... a small Vogue ‘library’, in order to start at the beginning. The beginning. British Vogue was born in September 1916, when German U-boats (really quite chic in their way – silver-blue with muscular lines) prevented the Americans from transporting their edition to British shores. Muir, in his catalogue introduction, points out that Vogue’s inception ...”

“... Eleanor to the depression that helped precipitate her husband’s affair. After her last child was born and Franklin had that affair, Eleanor entered a female community. It was the turning-point of her life. She formed friendships with independent women social activists, some of whom lived sexual lives together. (One of these couples co-owned her Hyde Park ...”

“... Portillo’s visit as defence minister to Slovenia, Romania, Bulgaria and Macedonia in 1996, Anne Applebaum (coincidentally, for the Evening Standard) has a good old chuckle: Up and down the red carpets he walks, Her Majesty’s aircraft just behind him, the Macedonian defence minister just beside him, the Macedonian soldiers in front of him, looking ...”

“... This is not a model which denies poetic development. Yet, by arguing that ‘when a new reality is born and exerts its pressure on poets, their resisting pressure of language and imagination generates a new poetic,’ Vendler limits the development of ‘poetry’ (steadily elided with ‘lyric’) to a re-negotiation of the self’s relationship with shifting ...”

“... about the Revolutionary women themselves. Figures who do not quite fit – like Marat’s printer, Anne Félicité Colombe, or Louise Kéralio, a radical but middle-class journalist – are forever consigned to the footnotes; and we are no nearer to being able to imagine the day-today life of the ordinary woman. Godineau wonders if, in the field of ...”