“... as a Polish émigré confessional poet. Of Mitchell and Laura, antique dealers from North London, boring, rather foodie, with an interest in old guns. The swimming pool, Levy warns us, is ‘more like a pond’ than pools usually look like in shiny brochures. But still, we think we understand what we’re seeing: the villa, the pool, the white ...”

“... At the Paris Salon​ of 1822, the young French artist Adrienne-Marie-Louise Grandpierre-Deverzy exhibited The Studio of Abel de Pujol, a painting of her teacher’s workshop. More than a dozen female trainees are shown going about their business. A little group looks over de Pujol’s shoulder as he critiques a sketch; others make copies from paintings selected for their improving moral content; in the background, two women are sketching from a ringleted, clothed female model, concentrating on getting the folds of the drapery right ...”

“... morte que changée (‘I rather break than bend’) as her personal motto. After moving from London to Heidelberg on her marriage to Frederick in 1613, the 16-year-old Elizabeth was observed by German courtiers returning from a hunt, crossbow in hand, having ‘chased the deer after such a fashion that it was marvelled at and in this country even seemed ...”

“... the realm of fairground display, or its modern equivalent. There is no movement to reclassify the London Dungeon or Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors as ‘museums’; while, for all the virtual reality of its ‘Blitz Experience’, the Imperial War Museum takes care not to be a sideshow of gore and guts. In Britain, debates about the nature of the ...”

“... execution and discounted the mature deliberation with which she made her choices. (The Bishop of London, for example, called this middle-aged professional administrator a ‘poor, defenceless English girl’.) In this respect she has written a revisionist book, but in all others Edith Cavell is an anti-Strachey, or perhaps a pre-Strachey, biography – a ...”

“... we are born. Are we really free? Or is free-will and responsibility an illusion? In July 1978, Louise Brown precipitated and focused some of these concerns. She was born after an entirely normal pregnancy, but from a conception that took place in a laboratory dish. Moral or not? Legal or not? Playing God? Her existence was made possible by the work of ...”

“... been a wave of enthusiasm for ‘experimental fiction’. A new crop of writers such as Claire-Louise Bennett, Kevin Davey, Will Eaves, Eimear McBride and Eley Williams, all published by independent presses, started to attract attention, and there was a flurry of excitement about writing that departed in some way from the conventions of realism which still ...”

“... In a speech at the London School of Economics in June this year, Antonio Caesese, the President of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, spoke about the century’s greatest forgotten massacre and the role of the ‘Justice Commandos of the Armenian Genocide’ in drawing it to the world’s attention ...”

“... Serge, hero of the anti-Stalinist left. Several of her works are lost, including The Commune, Louise Michel and Us, a film she worked on in the early 1970s and ‘Guns for Banta’, a feature she shot in 1970 in Guinea-Bissau during the liberation war against the Portuguese.Maldoror moved on from her successes as briskly as she did from projects that ...”

“... mayhem.The Fatal Alliance is to some degree autobiographical: ‘I was born in February 1941, in a London being bombed, and I was told by everyone in my childhood that it was a good thing “we” had won the war.’ To the visceral pleasures of the battle scene could now be added the moral intoxication of victory in a ‘just’ war: a war there had been no ...”

“... the European nobility. Wilhelm of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen was a regular reader of the Illustrated London News, the Bukarester Tageblatt and Indépendance romaine; while the Dutch noblewoman Victoria Bentinck once commented that a niece of hers had blundered by marrying a German count who could speak no other language than his own, and so was a ‘“fish out ...”

“... English still seemed to assume that literature in Britain meant anglophone literature published in London, and usually written there too. Anyone doubting that all this has changed for ever over the course of a generation which has seen the signing of the Good Friday Agreement and the founding of the Welsh Assembly and the Scottish Parliament needs only to feel ...”

“... on atheists and heretics, a 53-line doggerel poem was pinned to the churchyard wall of the London church frequented by Dutch Protestant refugees. Known as the ‘Dutch Church libel’, it survives only in a single manuscript copy (now in the Bodleian). Chiming with other recent anonymous attacks on the Protestant asylum seekers whose presence in ...”

“... amorous, and therefore suck in the poison more deeply.’ Venereal disease was ubiquitous in London during the 18th century and syphilis in particular reached epidemic levels. Contemporary commentators warned that the ‘clap’ (gonorrhoea) and the ‘pox’ (syphilis) were rife; towards the end of the century almost a third of the patients in St ...”

“... a proponent of free love, which he practised with a number of women, including the journalist Louise Bryant, who said she was getting ‘too serious’ about him, before she sailed to Russia to meet her husband, John Reed; she left Thayer a nude photo of herself and implored him to visit her in Europe, ‘anywhere you say’. He maintained good relations ...”