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“... us later’. It is to the investigation of such demonic remedies that the groundbreaking work of Louise Noble and Richard Sugg is devoted. The belief that a wide range of maladies could be cured by the consumption of human remains – principally in the form of so-called ‘mummy’ – persisted in Europe for at least six centuries. Although the ...”

“... with arthritis that he can’t hold a razor. He can’t keep a conversation going with Jean Louise, alias Scout, the daughter beloved by him in our memory, without it involving slights about the life she now lives in New York. But what Atticus can hold – and does, rather extravagantly – is a set of views about black people that might put him on a ...”

“... of Peter Weiss’s The Investigation (‘Auschwitz in New York’) and of Büchner’s ‘noble and complicated’ play Danton’s Death, where for ‘lack of historical feeling’ a ‘sort of coarse tarpaulin fell over the whole enterprise’. By contrast, Hardwick celebrates Peter Brook’s bare, difficult production of Timon set in a working-class ...”

“... I’d lived. Fifty-six, though … And the plain, shapeless robes of an abbess – me, Marguerite-Louise of Orléans! Who would have thought it?’ The rather novelettish flavour disappears as the narrative takes hold. A mysterious visitor tells this unusual Reverend Mother his life story, and is similarly scrupulous about chronology (‘Late afternoon. April ...”

“... as the Duke of Cambridge, the Marquess of Carisbrooke or the Earl of Athlone? The subject of Noble Frankland’s well-intentioned but unconvincing effort at rehabilitation, His Royal Highness Prince Arthur William Patrick Albert, Duke of Connaught and Strathearn, and Earl of Sussex, was the prototypical marginal royal. If the essential qualification for ...”

“... was complicated, as one might expect. In 1853 he explained it to – of all people – his lover Louise Colet: It may be a perverted taste, but I love prostitution, and for itself, too, quite apart from its carnal aspects. My heart begins to pound every time I see one of those women in low-cut dresses walking under the lamplight in the rain, just as monks ...”

“... Mme de Blazac required a complaisant ear, so unfortunate did she consider her fate to be. The noble surname had been acquired, it seemed, for its own sake, since her husband, whom she described as a saint, did not appear from her account to be up to much as a provider, and had left Mme de Blazac without resources of her own, since in her subdued and ...”

“... effects are those of charm and pathos. In the narrative’s front rank are a trio of characters. Louise is familial: she has husband, children and grandchildren. Regi is a social butterfly: she has gigolos even in her incontinent bedridden old age. Other than her childhood friend Louise, Regi sustains no attachments. Both ...”

“... I first encountered it in a 1986 essay on travel writing and descriptive ethnography by Mary Louise Pratt, in which she points to ‘a very familiar, widespread and stable form of “othering”’ whereby ‘the people to be othered are homogenised into a collective “they”.’ This process goes on, even without the assistance of North American ...”

“... of his attitudes – he was a great equestrian and an athlete – he was neither a peasant nor a noble by birth, but the scion of a well-to-do, landowning, impeccably republican family, who became a polished boulevardier. The Clemenceaus were free-thinkers whose politics were formed in 1789. There were many good things about this highly cultivated man who ...”

“... ladders. Indeed, hairdressers were exalted as never before. Until Marie-Antoinette’s day, only noble ladies had touched the royal head. But she employed a man and a commoner, Léonard, and thought so highly of him that she took him with her in 1791 when the royal family tried to escape over the border. Marie-Antoinette’s chief talent was for amusing ...”

“... miserable; while most of his American friends and employers were already (in 1915) cheering for noble Britain and poor little Belgium in their resistance to fiendish Germany, Reed could see only the triumph of a ruling capitalist class which had deluded the masses into patriotic illusion. In August 1914, Reed had written an anonymous piece for the Masses ...”

“... and uncaring worldly mother. The most vivid character and best lay in the story is not the writer Louise de Vilmorin who questioned the Baron about circumcision while running her fingers through his pubic hair, but Charley Brighton, née Charlotte Bouquet, the daughter of a hotel doorman in Grenoble: ‘I spotted this piece of skirt strolling along the ...”

“... Orléans y Borbón, Duchess of Galliera; Prince Albert, Duke of Schleswig-Holstein; Princess Marie Louise of Anhalt; and Princess Alice of Teck. The First World War was a challenge to this high society of monarchs and aristocrats. The Russian-born Dowager Duchess of Coburg was denounced in Germany as a spy; she was British before she became German, having ...”

“... various ‘stories’ and one ‘rant’ drawn from Flaubert’s letters, most of them written to Louise Colet when he was working on Madame Bovary (of which Davis has published a translation). These are reliably sharper in tone and more highly coloured than anything Davis provides on her own account. In ‘The Funeral’, for instance, Flaubert describes the ...”