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“... The earliest astrolabe​ in the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford was made in Syria in the ninth century and is inscribed with text in Arabic and later additions in Armenian. Two made in Seville in the first quarter of the 13th century also have Arabic script – Seville was then still under Islamic rule. One made in England in the 14th century is inscribed with Latin script and uses a dragon’s head to point at a star, a design feature mainly employed in Europe; its plates are marked for the latitudes of Toledo, Rome, Cologne, Paris, London and Berwick, possibly revealing the travels of its owners ...”

“... the Middle Ages to the present, developing a strand of recent scholarship of which its curator, Marion Turner, is a leading proponent. There are echoes here of Turner’s Chaucer: A European Life (2019), which examined the places with which Chaucer is associated, sometimes via his literary sources (a number of ...”

“... sycophantic courtier, ironist and, not least, duelling misogynist and feminist versions. In Marion Turner’s capacious biography – the first since Derek Pearsall’s in 1992 and the first ever by a woman – Chaucer is Bakhtinian and plural, a man of many voices. Much like his Canterbury pilgrims, he is always en route but never arriving. We ...”

“... which she delivers the first blow) do they come to an agreement about how to live together.Marion Turner’s ‘biography’ of the Wife of Bath sets out to explain Alysoun’s ‘long career as a bookrunner – a figure that escapes her own text’. Turner argues that much of Alysoun’s appeal comes from her ...”

“... Most loyal and protective of Gurney’s many friends, Marion Scott wrote after one of her regular visits to the asylum: ‘Ivor is so heart-breakingly sane in his insanity.’ Letters, reported conversation, music, poems all attest to the fact. He was trained and already admired as a composer before enlistment; in the trenches poetry had occupied him more and more and, when he returned afterwards to music, the poetry continued ...”

“... health’ anyway, with three more novels. Les Jolies Choses (2008) was made into a film with Marion Cotillard in it. Bye Bye Blondie (2004) was made into a film in 2012 with Béatrice Dalle and Emmanuelle Béart, and directed by Despentes herself. Since 2006 or so Despentes – as she wrote last year in a furious attack on Lionel Jospin and his ...”

“... called it’s always the quiet one.’ The genre got off to a cracking start a long time ago with Marion Crawford’s book about the Little Princesses. That really set the standard: ‘Crawfie’, the former governess, got excommunicated, everybody (except the reader) felt betrayed, and the world of the British royals suddenly seemed quite comic. Dozens of ...”

“... A Study of Facts and Problems, which is a brilliant work of scholarship, but scarcely a page-turner. Then in the 1970s the greatest of all of Shakespearean biographers, Samuel Schoenbaum, produced two books which split the activity of writing lives of Shakespeare into two distinct practices. William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life (1975) recorded almost ...”

“... Charles Henry Langston, was an abolitionist too; he insisted they name their son after Nat Turner, the leader of the 1831 Virginia slave revolt. His younger brother, John Langston, became one of the most prominent advocates for Black rights in the Reconstruction era, and was elected to Congress in 1890. By 1901, however, when Hughes was born, the ...”

“... The Sadeian Woman may have roots in Surréalisme et sexualité by Xavière Gauthier (1971), which Marion Boyars commissioned Carter to translate into English then rejected – no English translation of the book has yet appeared, although the Swedish scholar Anna Watz has one in preparation, and has a chapter on the connection in her recently published Angela ...”