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“... The Gathering – Anne Enright’s fourth novel, and her best – is aware of its heritage, of the books that have gone before it. It makes use of familiar signals and motifs. It is centred on a wake for a man who has died early: an alcoholic who was betrayed as a child, part of a large, chaotic family. So far so Irish ...”

“... And can love be said to have its own economy? In Economy of the Unlost and Autobiography of Red, Anne Carson has proposed answers to both these questions. Economy of the Unlost is a compact yet supple series of essays (first aired in the Martin Classical Lectures series delivered annually at Oberlin College) complementing her previous long essay on a ...”

“... death of her husband, which was followed, nearly nine months later, by the arrival of a child born out of normal time. At the age of 34, she was an orphan, a widow and the single, pregnant mother of three young children. It was too much, I think. She spent her days reading and her talents as a gardener were much admired, but she was a poor housekeeper and ...”

“... greatest tacticians of the age, and an important influence on Napoleon’s own style of warfare. Born in 1743, he first saw action fighting against Corsican rebels (including members of the Bonaparte family) in 1768-69, and on his return to mainland France composed an ambitious tragedy about a Renaissance traitor, The Constable de Bourbon. Like Saint-Lambert ...”

“... state of grace. Let us also hope that he does not vote for the Democratic Unionist Party. She was born Iris Collins in 1949. Her mother was called Mary and her father was called Joseph. He was a demobbed soldier who died, just before her sixth birthday, of a chronic illness contracted on active service in the Far East. Iris, who describes herself as ...”

“... screws. In a sure, deep voice, with an English private school accent (he and my grandfather were born and brought up in London, and went to St Paul’s) Robin describes the events of a May night and morning near the plantation where he was assistant manager in Kodanad, high in the mountains in what is now the state of Tamil Nadu. The previous night a leopard ...”

“... an international bestseller, and the basis for Jean-Jacques Annaud’s 1992 film. Duras was born in 1914 in what is now Vietnam and was then French Indo-China, the youngest of three children. Both her parents were schoolteachers. Her father, Henri Donnadieu, died in 1921, at the age of 49, while on leave in France. Just before he died, he bought a small ...”

“... was not a good breeder. Only one of their children was to survive into adulthood, a girl, Mary, born in February 1516. Henry professed himself delighted, and in due course the little Princess of Wales was sent to the castle at Ludlow to assume the duties of the heir to the throne. But it was not to beget daughters that Henry had married Catherine. As the ...”

“... she is. And she is powerful. Flanking her are her four daughters, Elizabeth, Mary, Henrietta and Anne. She would marry two of them off to dukes, and two of them to earls. And when the time came, she would net as partners for her seven granddaughters five dukes, an earl and a viscount. As for her husband and son, she would outlive them both by years. Viewed ...”

“... Jayne Anne Phillips’s first novel of more than a decade ago, Machine Dreams, reconstructed the history of three generations of a single middle-class, small-town American family over the course of some fifty years. From the perspective, by turns, of parents and children, she contemplated the complexities and banalities of relations among family members against the political background of the time, focusing on the far-ranging effects that were brought to bear by the Second World War, the Korean War and the Vietnam War ...”

“... some stories don’t call for another colour. Pale grey, for example, might be about right for Anne Fontaine’s Gemma Bovery (2014), a stately, not obviously funny film in which an English woman stumbles into Flaubert’s plot and dies not deliberately by arsenic poisoning but accidentally by swallowing, or rather failing to swallow, a chunk of ...”

“... crossing at baptism was ‘pernicious, popish and idolatrous’, and wished her baby would be born without a head rather than have it crossed: she was duly delivered of a headless monster, which bore a cross on its breast. God had declared himself: he and his ceremonies would not be mocked. (And, incidentally, the King and the bishops were right and their ...”

“... Everything happens at once’ in the year charted by Jayne Anne Phillips in MotherKind – her heroine Kate becomes and loses a mother. The book records tiny actions and reactions: Kate changes baby Tatie’s nappy and her mother’s sickroom flowers, spoonfeeds mashed-up banana to one and morphine to the other ...”

“... old. When Henry died Cranmer had been his Archbishop for 13 years, through the rise and fall of Anne Boleyn and of Thomas Cromwell. It was Cranmer’s hand that Henry grasped at the last when his power of speech was gone to indicate the confirmation of his assured Christian belief. Legend has it that Cranmer grew the beard as a sign of mourning for the man ...”

“... is just how compromised he was. He came from a very ordinary lower-middle-class family. He was born in 1886 near the Holloway Road, not far from where the Pooters famously resided. For part of his childhood the family lived in St Albans but Williams was always a great Londoner, a man as entranced by the city streets as Dickens or Charles Lamb; in his last ...”