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“... and their approaches to surviving, and sometimes thriving, in the heyday of the empire. Sarah E. Bond’s Strike is an alternative history of Rome that foregrounds the various kinds of grassroots group that proliferated in the empire, some of which people joined willingly and others they were forced into. Bowes ...”

“... pioneer life, but she saw no special value in that subject-matter until the Maine regional writer, Sarah Orne Jewett (whom she came to know in Boston while she was researching articles for Mc-Clure’s Magazine) wrote to her, in 1922: ‘Of course, one day you will write about your own country. In the meantime, get all you can. One must know the world so well ...”

“... and hangs from the door – we mostly have to take her word for it. M still lives with his ex, relies on his mother to buy his clothes and iron his shirts, disappears for days without calling or texting and ‘kicks his dog, not hard, but rather often’. Before long, he reveals his caratteraccio, his bad temper. Small irritations set him off. On one ...”

“... in becoming mothers, at least not in the conventional sense. Yet each establishes and defends a bond with a child, and finds herself in a parenting relationship based on trust and reciprocity.Mammoth follows an inverse arc. Once the narrator learns that she’s pregnant, she stops working for the shepherd and hides the pregnancy, telling him that she has a ...”

“... of destiny and bound himself more closely to his people than any of his ancestors. This human bond helped him to surmount the third potential threat to his throne, the unexpected election in 1945 of a Labour government, heralding a new era of socialism, austerity and – of particular regret to George – the loss of his Indian empire. In fact, the war ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Sister Line, My Brother Lanoé’). She finished her first two plays, Un rat qui passe and John et Joe, in 1972. John et Joe, about two middle-aged idlers and the lottery ticket passed between them, was performed first, in 1975, at a dinner theatre in Neuchâtel. In many ways it’s an outlier: the dialogue shares the ...”

“... converted by our own preconceptions; seldom are we won by the sheer logic of others. Rochester, as Sarah Wintle observes, ‘was not a particularly learned poet, but he was highly intelligent and able to seize upon and use the philosophical and conceptual commonplaces of his time and traditions.’ More than that risks overstatement. All the same, it is ...”

“... are unhappy, certainly, but their defining trait is inertia. In ‘Evidence of Old Repairs’, Sarah drinks, though not enough for AA. Her afternoon rum-and-Pepsis leave her maudlin and weepy, to the disgust of her 13-year-old daughter. A misshapen honeysuckle bush can drive her to tears; looking at the ‘soggy confetti’ of a failed salad, she knows ...”

“... up to the Man. There’s comradeship between celebrity dissidents. Sometimes this is practical: Sarah Harrison, Assange’s right-hand woman, flew to Sheremetyevo airport to help navigate Edward Snowden safely and legally into Moscow and get him a residency permit after his leaks broke in the summer of 2013. Sometimes it’s more nebulous: outlaws ...”

“... four years to this day, the American presidential election. It is a story that reminds us of the bond – political, cultural, economic, sentimental – between the United States and Cuba, a bond that tightened in the 1950s only to be torn apart once the guerrillas came to power. But despite a half-century of invasions and ...”

“... form and its energy from a lie’: The lie that the blackfellas had died out. That the ex-convicts had left the island for gold rushes in other countries. That only pure free white settler stock remained. Like all great lies there was some truth in these assertions . . . But at the end of the day most blackfellas and convicts remained on the ...”

“... going to be like everybody else? (Brave 1980s attempts at normality failed, and brought us Sarah Ferguson, the commoner’s commoner.) So, Prince Charles, his whole life, has been accused of wastefulness, self-importance and fastidious idleness, and any book that claimed otherwise would be considered a letdown. The new biography by Catherine ...”

“... was my sister-in-law and in those days we didn’t text – and said I really should go along to Bond Street and see the butterflies hatching in some disused premises that the artist Damien Hirst had rented. ‘It’s a truly beautiful installation,’ she enthused. She described it: the dishes of melting nectar, the chrysalises stuck to the walls, and the ...”

“... his own building business and his mother taught children with learning disabilities. His sister Sarah was six years older and always had her head in a book. Three times a year they would go on holiday, once to another part of England, and twice abroad. The Millars liked their English lives. They were well enough off to spoil their son, who has strong ...”