“... in case de Staël’s vengeance should light on them. Meanwhile, he appealed to his generous aunt, Anne de Nassau, to write to de Staël, begging her to give him his freedom. ‘He has been weak enough to put up with that servitude out of consideration for the pain you claim to be suffering and your histrionic grief,’ Madame de Nassau wrote. It was a good ...”

“... unideological, patronage-based one-party government. He agrees that between the death of Queen Anne and the accession of George III, the Tories had no share in government, and were systematically discriminated against in the distribution of local patronage. But where his opponents think 1688 was decisive, he does not; where they think the propertied ...”

“... the bulldozer and the dinosaur was obvious to any child – but not the connection between the power of petrol and the mysterious beauty of the small trembling rainbow swirls in the many puddles of the 1970s.’ The curiously loose weave of Knausgaard’s prose allows it to return parts of the reader’s own life to them – maybe this is especially true ...”

“... to hear a little more about the women who edited British poetry anthologies: Janet Adam Smith, Anne Ridler and Helen Gardner. Who were the first British female anthologists? Why didn’t they have the success of American anthologists such as Amy Lowell and Harriet Monroe?Allingham claimed in the preface to Nightingale Valley that poetry had the ...”

“... book, and after being discharged he dictated the first version of this one to his assistant, Anne-Sylvie Malbrancke.The basic facts of the matter are straightforward, and everyone understands them well. You are not supposed to have sex or procreate with certain immediate family members. Typically the list includes your parents, your children and your ...”

“... Umayyad prince, Abd al Rahman, fled to a different peninsula on the edge of the Atlantic and took power in al-Andalus, the name given by the Arabs to the whole of Muslim Spain.The homage paid by Cervantes in Don Quixote to the heritage of Spanish Islam is seldom remarked on. (There isn’t a single reference to it in Harold Bloom’s weak, lazy introduction ...”

“... non-patrician. Fielding’s antipathy was partly conditioned by a dislike of the veristic power of Richardson’s novel: its pretence of ‘to the Moment’ narration by a participant in the thick of the action, its particularity of specification, and its thrusting of its readers into an intimacy with the narrative which Fielding seems to have ...”

“... archive, now online, is a gory mish-mash of psychedelia, drugs, the occult, squatting, flower power, music, libertarian sexual politics – softly pornographic while staunchly pro-gay, with a smattering of second-wave feminism – and a contempt for the establishment that occasionally strays into serious politics. IT had been quicker to respond to ‘les ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... province of Katanga. The prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, was deposed after only three months in power. Four months later he was assassinated by a scratch firing squad overseen by former Belgian colonial police officers. In 2001, a Belgian parliamentary committee concluded that the government of the day ‘bore a moral responsibility’ for Lumumba’s ...”

“... publishers, who thereby risked less on each individual title. The system gave considerable power to the buyers for Mudie’s and Smith’s, who in turn feared offending or disappointing their largely conventional upper and middle-class clientele. As usual with such rigged markets, the whole system was invisibly underpinned by shared social assumptions ...”

“... there was nothing false or laughable in him. At 27, Achille-Cléophas had married the 18-year-old Anne-Justine-Caroline and immediately produced a son, Achille, who, as his name foretold, was to follow in his father’s footsteps. After Achille, however, there were three children who all died shortly after birth, so that Gustave was born eight years after his ...”

“... judges, saw fit to ponder for one moment what effect that had on their chances of a fair trial. Anne Maguire and her family, including 13-year-old Patrick, entered the dock in the Old Bailey on trial for possession of explosives after the massive publicity that attended the Guildford bombings trial, which had finished not long before. The media had made ...”

“... left him. For many people, the story which has come to represent all such stories is the story of Anne Frank, whose ordeal in hiding in Amsterdam was mocked by a fate that decreed she should be discovered and transported within a few months of liberation. Harry Mulisch treats the plight of the Dutch Jews, and of Jews everywhere at that time, with his own kind ...”

“... of the New Comedy of Menander. But comic dramatists also often seem to have been attracted to what Anne Barton has called Cratylic names – those which appear to endorse the view of Plato’s Cratylus that there is an intrinsic relationship between name and nature. Aristophanes has Dicaeopolis (‘just city’) and Lysistrata (‘disbander of ...”