“... to leave France in the face of royal prohibition, they continued to be busy and productive. John Houblon, from a Huguenot family which had arrived from France in a slightly earlier wave of Catholic persecution, became the first governor of the Bank of England in 1694 and a knight of the realm; until 2014, his luxuriantly bewigged features adorned our ...”

“... thing,’ a character reflects. ‘It collapsing without purpose or meaning is quite another.’ John Cole, an ageing bookseller, is one of the last to leave, and gets lost when he finally does, ending up in the grounds of a dilapidated country house whose residents seem to be expecting him. Perry handles his growing sense of dread with considerable ...”

“... compiled from four ebook novellas by Luke Jennings of the Observer, is called Codename Villanelle (John Murray, £7.99). Eve is going to become a target. But it’s nice to know that neither of the main women will die before the end of the first episode. It’s the men who are collateral damage, or might be: the men Villanelle is instructed to kill (by a ...”

“... a new Laure Prouvost show and Charlie Gard and Call Me by Your Name and cab drivers in Rome and John McCain’s part in the GOP vote to roll back Obamacare. And a year later, almost to the day, here is Crudo – born of accident, on holiday, like a dare – and it is already on the Sunday Times bestseller list. ‘Kathy, by which I mean I,’ it ...”

“... fictive, prospective or real (floods, kidnappings, automobile accidents, the Beast of St John); fairy tales; shopping malls, hospitals, high street stores, dinner parties, graves. All these places and events can break people, or contain those who are broken. She can even put many of these things in the same poem. ‘Sensual Pleasures’ (another new ...”

“... as punishment for looking into Persephone’s box of beauty, but revived by her lover, Cupid. John Philip Kemble revived Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale in 1802 with his sister, Sarah Siddons, in the role of Hermione. At the end of the play, when Leontes is introduced to a statue of the wife whom he believes to be long dead, Siddons, draped in ...”

“... we existed’. But ‘Where the world ends, everything cut down’, the flowers become names: ‘John Crawford. Eric Garner. Mike Brown’. Although the collection’s title clearly refers to America’s tradition of racial violence, it also invokes another, less well-known poetic tradition, Black nature writing – which, as Evie Shockley writes in Renegade ...”

“... keynote’. In echoing the name of Egerton’s 1893 collection of stories, Keynotes (published by John Lane, who went on to issue the Yellow Book), James was inviting readers to consider the nature of her psychologically penetrative fiction, and the related methods of the contemporary press. In some ways, Egerton does indeed behave like James’s most ...”

“... an inmate’s sense of innate differences was often sharpened. When the Irish nationalist activist John Mitchel was transported in 1848, first to the hulks off Bermuda, then to a penal colony in Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), one of his greatest torments was the perception that he was being treated no better than a West Indian slave. Escaping to the US, he ...”

“... was solemn, quiet, respectful, and it greatly helped that no one was allowed to film or record. John McDonnell MP spoke first, saying that his children and grandchildren are his most precious gifts, and that just as he condemned the killing of Israeli ‘innocents’ by Hamas, so his heart went out to everybody in Gaza. Jess Barnard, who sits on Labour’s ...”

“... is the violence books have endured. As Cummings peers close at the pocket-sized Gospel of St John in the British Library’s Ritblat Gallery, ‘the hairs stand on the back of my neck.’ The manuscript book was buried in a tomb with Saint Cuthbert of Lindisfarne soon after he died in 687; it was found when Cuthbert was disinterred in 1104 at Durham ...”

“... I have been suffering at times I could/step away from it by embracing it, a blues thing,/ a John Donne thing, divest by wrestling, then sing.’ Rhyme may be ‘arcane’, a done thing, but what the blues and Donne (Seuss must be thinking of his sonnet that begins ‘Batter my heart, three-person’d God’) show us is that formalising pain can be ...”

“... were sponsored by the London Stock Exchange). The chairman of the Wider Share Ownership Council, John Harvey-Jones, provided a blurb for Investor: ‘I am delighted to acknowledge its contribution to the wider understanding, in an enjoyable way, of the opportunities for wider share ownership.’ Bankers and traders were portrayed in films, books, plays and ...”

“... Virgin Mary, who took care of me … Fight with Hope devastating. Only person I had then was Uncle John who was rarely there or sober. The disillusion when he hit the kid and dog was Awful for me. The year or so left was lonely hell. Only reason i’m telling you this is that i know i have dealt with these few years ad nauseum. Problem is everytime I am ...”

“... to get away from her mother – they share a room – and spies an escape route in Master John Edes, a mild-mannered shipping clerk who has been teaching her to read the gospel. But Edes is an associate of a sinister newcomer called Matthew Hopkins, who is on a mission to root out witchcraft. In wartime Manningtree, Puritan fervour is running ...”