“... in religious life, translated them into French and popularised their story in his Roman de la Rose. One of his characters praises Heloise as peerless among women, but uses their tale all the same to warn men against marriage. A gothic legend recounts that when Heloise was buried beside Abelard, already 21 years dead, his skeleton opened its arms to ...”

“... scientifically – should never be seen again. But then, that’s what they thought before 1962.Christine Corton’s excellent book explores three questions: how people accounted for London fog, what they did about it, and how it became such an enormous, apparently inexhaustible cultural resource and metaphor. Liability to fog has ultimately something to do ...”

“... a pub in Ipswich, while his great-great-grandson, Richard Duke of Suffolk, nicknamed ‘Blanche Rose’, was accepted as King of England – but, alas, only by the French, and only till he was killed in battle at Pavia. There is an irony, on which Derek Pearsall ends his book, in the extirpation of the Chaucer line around 1539 at virtually the same moment ...”

“... themes continued to flourish among medievalists, and a group of 15th-century historians, led by Christine Carpenter, advocated a ‘new constitutional history’ addressing the structural frameworks that underpin political action. In their concern with political culture and expectations about governance, these scholars’ approach diverges significantly ...”

“... well-being, maternal ambivalence and the direction of feminism runs very high, as Jacqueline Rose searchingly discussed in her essay ‘Mothers’ (LRB, 19 June 2014). Ever since Euripides showed unexpected sympathy with Medea she has been a heroine for real-world questions about women – their status, their weakness – and about betrayal, blood ties ...”

“... of mirth. ‘You’ve got a chance in a place like this,’ says a sixty-year-old woman called Rose at the opening of Harold Pinter’s first play, The Room. ‘It was the alcoholics’ paradise,’ Barry Humphries writes in his introduction to Darren Coffield’s entertaining book.You merely ran up a slate. Later, much later, came the reckoning, but you ...”

“... and Powell, but he was not destined to be on the backbenches for long. In a debate on the NHS he rose to take on the speaker all Tories feared most, Aneurin Bevan. A few months later, Churchill made him Minister of Health. Macleod was so shaken that he had to go to a phone box to find out where on earth his ministry was. He announced that he would be the ...”

“... on its enemies and to honour their experiences. In a book about Tazmamart published in the 1990s, Christine Daure-Serfaty, a French activist working on behalf of Hassan’s detainees, added that she was frightened of ‘forgetting’ and eager to perform ‘an exorcism’ by sharing what she knew with her readers.*What little was reported in the ...”

“... wars in Iraq and Afghanistan made sanctions again seem a better alternative and their use rose dramatically. They have also grown more powerful, focusing on what Edward Fishman in his new study describes as one of the key ‘chokepoints’ in the world economy: control of the US dollar. Maritime trade has always had to negotiate geographic ...”

“... the river. The Great Fire of London was remarkable for prophesying, five years ahead of the event, Christine Edzard’s double-decker film of Little Dorrit. Here was a correspondence, a playful vortex of invention and coincidence in the style that Ackroyd would make familiar through bestselling biographies, histories and offshoot television ...”

“... to deliver the speech; John Profumo in 1963 as secretary for war for lying about his affair with Christine Keeler; and Amber Rudd as home secretary in 2018 during the Windrush scandal for claiming to be ignorant of the government’s immigration targets, although the figures had been sent to her. In Dalton’s case, it was at worst a bit of indiscreet ...”

“... yes’ (insofar as they call me anything, thought Mrs Ransome). ‘Just wondered if it was Rose or Rosie?’ ‘Oh no.’ ‘Hubby calls you Rosemary, does he?’ ‘Well, yes,’ said Mrs Ransome, ‘I suppose he does,’ and went to put the kettle on, thus enabling Dusty to make her first note: ‘Query: Is burglary the real problem here?’ When ...”

“... of storytelling, something understood by every human society known to history’. The novelist Christine Brooke-Rose, in an essay resigning her own deuxième carrière as a narratologist, describes narratology as ‘immensely useful. But in the end, it couldn’t cope with narrative and its complexities, except at the ...”

“... not just tourists but prospective residents and second-homers. Cyprus prospered. House prices rose. Ticket prices fell. More visitors, more residents, more houses, more money. First it was people with money seeking homes; then, in a shift that was barely noticeable until after it had happened, it was people seeking a home for their money. Is there some ...”

“... de l’Etat, isn’t embarrassed to say so. In her foreword to the agency’s 2010 report, Christine Lagarde – then minister for economic affairs in François Fillon’s cabinet – boasted that the state would be more active than ever in building ‘champions capable of competing with global market rivals’. In Thatcherite terms EDF was a public ...”