“... poems in German, sketches on nature, plans for seizing power in Britain (‘Blow up the Great North Road’) and some ecstatic love letters to Marxism. ‘I want to dedicate myself to it,’ he wrote aged 17. ‘I want to dive into it as into the sea, and drown in it. I want to love it, passionately … and yet spiritually. Like one loves a woman.’ At ...”

“... to England. The mummy’s gilded mask was donated to the British Museum; the coffin went to Lady Susan Meux for her private museum of Egyptian artefacts at Theobalds Park in Hertfordshire. She died in 1911, leaving her collection to the British Museum, but they didn’t want it: it was a condition of her bequest that it be kept together rather than absorbed ...”

“... Although first published in the United States, both books deal with England and other countries. Susan Faludi extensively revised her 1991 American edition for the 1992 British edition. This version, with a Preface by Joan Smith, includes information regarding the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Australia. Marilyn French deals with Southern and Eastern ...”

“... with Herne the Hunter, who is mentioned in The Merry Wives of Windsor and reimagined in Susan Cooper’s children’s fiction), and even Epona the horse goddess, often thought to lie behind the horse-dominated stories of Rhiannon in the Welsh Mabinogion. Britain is notably lacking in evidence for the cult of Epona that was widespread ...”

“... for aspirants to literary fame to hack their way to a modest living. At this propitious moment, a North-countryman in his early twenties who had defied sound counsel to become a writer met an Anglo-Welshman – a native of London, six years his senior – in the same line. They lived for a time in adjacent lodgings. For a week they subsisted on cheese and ...”

“... short day’s journey, were obliterated.’ While staying with the Pollexfens, he met their sister Susan, whom he would marry in 1863. Years later, when he tried to explain his decision to marry Susan Pollexfen, Yeats said that her family genius ‘for being dismal’ was, he felt, what he needed. ‘Indeed it was because of ...”

“... has been written about Serge’s life, first and foremost in his own Memoirs of a Revolutionary. Susan Weissman provided a meticulous account in Victor Serge: A Political Biography, published in 2001. Born Victor Lvovich Kibalchich in Brussels in 1890, Serge was the son of poverty-stricken intellectuals who had fled tsarist Russia. The family name itself was ...”

“... two teachers at the local secondary modern are disturbed by the behaviour of a pupil called Susan, and investigate. Susan turns out to be the granddaughter and travelling companion of a strange old man, known only as the Doctor – she was made a relative, it is said, because the writer was uncomfortable with the ...”

“... Brink contains the transcript of the tripartite conference in Havana in January 1992. The three North American authors responded to the Cuban side of the story by asking themselves: ‘how is it possible with millions of lives hanging in the balance – not only American and Soviet lives, but Cuban lives – Fidel Castro would fatalistically accept ...”

“... defeated observers, as if her life stretched back into a fabulous era when dragons roamed. Susan Higginbotham’s carefully written book comes with a misleading cover puff: ‘At last, a biography of one of the most fascinating women of the Tudor period’, who has ‘too long been overlooked’. But Margaret Pole, one of the great magnates of Tudor ...”

“... on us.’It would be a mistake to call Covid-19 nature’s revenge, except as a metaphor. As Susan Sontag argued, illness has no ‘meaning’, and interpreting it runs the risk of stigmatising its carriers – particularly if they can be depicted as in some way ‘other’: foreign, sexually ‘deviant’, non-white. Trump’s fulminations against the ...”

“... the different domestic smells of cooking, bodily waste and young children. As the lawyer Roger North wrote in 1698, ‘the affectation of cleanliness hath introduc’t much variety of rooms, which the ancients had no occasion for.’ The 18th century’s wholesale replacement of personal scents based on excremental animal odours with fragrant essences ...”

“... and Beloved during a term punctuated by communal outings to Ocracoke, a barrier island off the North Carolina coast, and Somerset Place Plantation near Edenton, North Carolina. Tompkins was thrilled by the sense of immediacy, intimacy and improvisation – ‘For me the course had been a wondrous series of ...”

“... of his chaotic presidency. On the Sunday before the election, he held rallies in Michigan, Iowa, North Carolina, Georgia and Florida – a jet-fuelled version of the whistle-stop tour by which Harry Truman in 1948 demonstrated his political nerve against the favourite and eventual loser of that year, Thomas E. Dewey. The implied comparison, in 2020, was with ...”

“... and explorers to navigate, but the transmission of the technology through the Middle East, North Africa and Europe also maps the passage of ideas, culture and science during the Middle Ages, a period when knowledge, preserved in Islamic centres of learning, was returning to the Christian parts of Europe, often by way of Islamic ...”