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“... and unthinking, vengeful behaviour on the ground. Two cases stand out: those of Myra Hindley and Sarah Payne. In both public fury has prevailed over fairness, the interests of the bereaved over those of the community as a whole. In 1966, Myra Hindley and Ian Brady were convicted of the murder of two children whom they had abducted and tortured. They received ...”

“... 160 of these letters has now been published for the first time and translated into English by Sarah Death. Covering the period between 1932 and 1988, they trace Jansson’s life more intimately than any autobiography.She was born in 1914 to two artists from the Swedish-speaking minority in Finland. Her mother, Signe Hammarsten, known as ...”

“... Equity, the old owner never knew He’d end up playing Yorick, A role still more mature than Lear. Death does his cameo walk-on ...”

“... The memoirs of Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, are among the more remarkable documents of the 18th century. Begun by 1704, they were written, rewritten and ghostwritten over three decades before publication in 1742. An Account of the Conduct of the Dowager Duchess of Marlborough, from Her First Coming to Court to the Year 1710 was a none too subtle attempt at vindicating her brief period as favourite to Queen Anne, justifying her personal and political roles, refuting slanders against her and her warrior husband, and defaming her enemies, both dead and alive ...”

“... In early September 1878, an old woman named Sarah Tomkins lay dying at her lodgings on Penton Place, an undistinguished terrace in the South London district of Newington. The street was poor but it clung to respectability: one might call it ‘shabby genteel’. Once it had led down to the popular Surrey Gardens, but now the gardens had closed and a rash of new housing was spreading across the area ...”

“... contain, apart from what one might expect in the way of letters and journals, everything from death certificates to poems. There is much to enjoy too, as there would be in any lively historical novel, past or present. But the eulogy pronounced by the great Simon Schama, author of Citizens, calls for comment: ‘A dazzling achievement,’ he writes, ‘an ...”

“... future hopes. But the effect is to carry the eye to the very centre of the work, to the figure of Sarah Marlborough. Clad in luxurious silk, with her feet apart and her arms relaxed, she sits with her back to a massive pillar. She and the artist had quarrelled, and this, legend has it, is why he portrayed her staring sourly out of the canvas, fixing anyone ...”

“... Sarah Bernhardt’s strangest gift – or so it seems a hundred years after the fact – was her ability to make the most improbable people go cuckoo over her. An otherwise mopey young D.H. Lawrence, for example. In 1908, having seen her perform one of her signature roles – Marguerite, the doomed courtesan in La Dame aux camélias – Lawrence sounds like a decadent schoolgirl on heat: ‘Oh, to see her, and to hear her, a wild creature, a gazelle with a beautiful panther’s fascination and fury, sobbing and sighing like a deer sobs, wounded to death, and all the time with the sheen of silk, the glitter of diamonds … She represents the primeval passions of woman, and she is fascinating to an extraordinary degree ...”

“... of these subjects are overpowered by the story Moore tells of parents who are responsible for the death of their child. ‘What further horror could match this?’ asks the chorus in Medea. In Moore’s earlier fictions, the death of a child is an imaginative no man’s land: no stories can come out of it or after it. In ...”

“... for him to marry her. If he had accepted, she might well have found herself in something akin to Sarah Austin’s position as emotional and financial prop to a miserable, selfish hypochondriac. As it was, her relationship with the very different G.H. Lewes, fostered by Spencer himself in his eagerness to retreat, blossomed within the year, and by 1854 Marian ...”

“... irrepressible love and paralysing grief – but it is still more about the analysis of feeling. Sarah Durham (‘a good sensible name for a sensible woman’) is a theatrical producer, 65 years old. Calm, reasonable and successful, she imagines that the storms of adolescence and middle age are behind her. A voice from the past disturbs this cultivated ...”

“... months before. ‘I thought Sadie had done exceptionally well to be so efficient and laconic in death,’ he says. ‘But now, as I trawled through the pathetic items in the envelope, I felt the familiar prickings of parental disappointment. She had, it seemed, succumbed to the sentimentalities of leave-taking, after all. And Christ, isn’t life hard ...”

“... I dislike the cult of dreams,’ Sarah Ferguson declares. ‘They should be secret things, and people who are always telling you of what they have dreamt irritate me. Nor do I like hearing psychological discussions between those who do not really know what they are talking about. There is something soft and messy about such people ...”

“... which readers conveyed to Richardson or to Dickens over the fate of Clarissa or Paul Dombey (whose death ‘threw a whole nation into mourning’) is disconcertingly replicated in popular responses to radio and TV soap-operas. What Flaubert was to extol as novelistic ‘illusion’ has obvious affinities with the hoax and other forms of vulgar ...”

“... concerns the aftermath of a relationship between the narrator, Maurice Bendrix, a novelist, and Sarah Miles, the wife of a civil servant, who live on opposite sides of Clapham Common. The framing narrative is set in 1946, when Bendrix and Sarah haven’t seen each other for 18 months. They had met in the summer of ...”