“... were tending toward social chaos’. The antinomian heresy (1636-8), provoked by the East Anglians Anne Hutchinson and John Wheelwright, and supported by at least nine East Anglian merchants, not only tore apart the town’s public decorum but threatened the structure of sexual relations. The most recent scholarly history of Springfield, Massachusetts, settled ...”

“... States last night.’ As Trump dispatched his ‘shiny and new’ missiles to Syria a year later, Anne-Marie Slaughter, a former Obama apparatchik and president of the New America Foundation, tweeted that it was the ‘right thing’ to do. ‘It will not stop the war nor save the Syrian people from many other horrors,’ Slaughter conceded, and ‘it is ...”

“... that they are going to stay young for ever – or perhaps they think the old and the young are born that way. The only defence against them is also a kindness: silence and knowledge. Even if we don’t take the Stoics to heart and live every moment as if it were our last, we should try to mitigate the awful shock that comes later on when we can’t fail to ...”

“... courtship, and men like Page in The Merry Wives sought to keep away fortune-hunters. The well-born but impecunious Fenton tells Anne Page that her father holds it ‘a thing impossible/I should love thee but as a property’, as though she walked about Windsor like stamped coin in sealed bags. Maus shows that these ...”

“... surgeon, a Chartist, a vegetarian, a philoprogenetive advocate of free love, who called his child, born in his late years, Jesu Grist (sic). When the baby died, he tried to burn him on a pyre, according to ancient Celtic custom (he claimed). He tried again, when another of his many children died. After each attempt, he was charged, but unexpectedly, he was in ...”

“... Chicago love affair to the political tribulations of French Left intellectuals after the war, as Anne’s forced choice of DeBreuilh over Lewis Brogan parallels DeBreuilh’s forced break with Henri and choice of the Soviet Union over the United States. Although Beauvoir always denied (unconvincingly) that the three major French characters were stand-ins for ...”

“... centre of “the King’s English” (Merry Wives, 1.4.5) (Chapter 2) and “the true-born Englishman” (Richard II, 1.3.273).’The result is challenging to read – there aren’t many sentences in Shakespeare’s Englishes which deploy fewer inverted commas and parentheses and references than the one I’ve just quoted – but ...”

“... in haste’, as he put it. They quarrelled and parted within months of the ceremony and Karl was born at Straiton, outside Edinburgh, to an effectively single mother. She passed him on to her own mother and her mother’s sisters in nearby Gilmerton, a working-class family whose older generation had worked in the pits of the Lothian coalfield around ...”

“... disease-ridden. In 1800, life expectancy at birth for a man was forty. Schubert made it to 31. Born in 1797, on the kitchen floor of a one-room apartment, he was the thirteenth child of fifteen, ten of whom died in infancy. His mother died when he was fifteen. His father – a schoolmaster, modestly successful, upright, thrifty, living well a life of which ...”

“... in SF has gained Dick’s posthumous eminence. But why him? Dick manifestly led a troubled life. Born in 1928, a twin whose sister died soon after birth, he spent his childhood in relative poverty with his divorced mother. The dead sister – like almost everything else in Dick’s early life – has fictional analogues: in Dr Bloodmoney (1965), we meet a ...”

“... of sociology, and drama favours a stage without too much human clutter. Veronica, the narrator of Anne Enright’s The Gathering, somewhere in the middle of a tribe of 12 (seventh from the top, fifth from the bottom), suggests there’s a certain uniformity about the large family: ‘There is always a drunk. There is always someone who has been interfered ...”

“... Victoria for his exploits and awarded the Iron Crown of Austria (second class), the orders of St Anne of Russia and of the Red Eagle of Prussia, as well as being a hereditary pasha of the Turkish Empire. These honours were added to those he’d already received, the Redeemer of Greece, the cross of the Légion d’honneur – he is wearing several of them in ...”

“... of object no longer exists locally, would that not be just as good a reason for a restitution?’ Anne Wetsi Mpoma, a Congolese gallerist based in Brussels, argues that provenance may even be an obstacle to restitution. It’s easy to imagine an artefact stranded in limbo as scholars rummage in the archive hoping to discover how it made its way to Belgium 150 ...”

“... Fielding was born in 1707 into a family in straitened circumstances but of aristocratic connections. A family myth, based on forged papers, claimed descent from the Hapsburgs. The combination of financial embarrassment and gentlemanly caste is emblematic of the whole atmosphere of his life, and is variously reflected in his writings ...”

“... Fauci and Deborah Birx, to tiptoe around his volcanic ego. The blithe inaction and bumbling born of ideological vanity have resulted in tens of thousands of avoidable deaths in both countries, with ethnic minorities heavily overrepresented. Meanwhile, rage against white supremacism is exploding on American streets. Whatever the fate of these ...”