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“... 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 ...”

“... which was simultaneously ‘inscribed into the meaning and practice of modern womanhood’. Susan Whyman’s The Pen and the People is a celebration of democratisation, showing how important letter-writing became to middling and even some plebeian English men and women. The key gauge used to measure literacy rates across large social groups is the ...”

“... occurred in Greece, and subsequently in South-Eastern France following the Allied landings in North Africa and the Axis takeover of what had previously been the Unoccupied Zone. For 13 months the Italians held firm. ‘Until the sudden armistice on 8 September 1943 ended the Axis partnership, no Jew under the protection of the Italian forces was ever ...”

“... I count a dozen cases, including that of the three Frenchmen, in this category. Among them are Susan Browne, ‘taken in bed with a Scotsman in a common bawdy house’; Anthony Horne, tailor, ‘locked up in a shed in Chiswell Street with Margery Blague in the night, and apprehended by the constable’; Henry Manne, gentleman, ‘complained to be a very ...”

“... and known as Ilios or Troia to the ancient Greeks – lie under a mound called Hissarlik in north-western Turkey. The events of the Iliad supposedly take place around the time of the collapse of the Bronze Age in the 12th century BC. By the time the poem was composed, several hundred years later, Troy was abandoned, its history constituted by rumour and ...”

“... of the servant can express a refusal to follow directions issued from above. As Dickens’s Susan Nipper (loyal and memorably insubordinate servant to the Dombey family) retorts, ‘it’s one thing to give orders, and quite another thing to take ’em.’ Placed in the margins of the novel’s characterisation and action, the apparently inconsequential ...”