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“... for the Congolese people working for them were dire. There’s a sickening description in Susan Williams’s book, from an American observer in the 1940s, of the flogging of a Congolese man with a chicotte – ‘a whip made of leather thongs tipped with metal’ – for stealing a pack of cigarettes from a Belgian. ‘The black’s skin from ...”

“... costly war that followed Angola’s independence from Portugal in 1975. In almost every case, as Susan Williams explains in White Malice, the US, attended by the former colonial powers, fought hard to influence the turn of events; before long, as Natalia Telepneva shows in Cold War Liberation, her account of decolonisation in Portuguese Africa, Moscow ...”

“... Mark Peel organises his serviceable authorised biography of Shirley Williams around an ostensible conundrum. Why didn’t Williams achieve more politically? Why did the polarising, hectoring Margaret Thatcher, rather than the consensus-seeking, appealing Williams, become Britain’s first woman prime minister? This is a common question ...”

“... where we dwell’ and ‘We are London Gentle-women borne.’ Both Eleanor Hubbard and Tim Reinke-Williams emphasise that ‘sexual behaviour was not the only activity which determined female identity and reputation.’ They use court records to examine the lives of 17th-century London women who married and raised children but also worked and socialised. Poor ...”

“... Unionist leaders of starting the trouble in a bid to unseat her. The Alliance councillor Noel Williams called the protests a ‘full frontal attack on democracy’. Long said they had the ‘dynamics of a pogrom’, and reminded those involved that they were wrapping themselves in a flag under which people from Northern Ireland and elsewhere had fought ...”

“... stolen from a nurse’s work-basket and fraudulently labelled, a poem about sunsets written by Mrs Williams all by herself with no help at all from Dr Johnson, a tuft of hair looking like something ‘plucked from the rump of a squirrel’ and purporting to come from the head of Mr Pope, together with an empty space reserved for a promised monkey’s paw. Here ...”

“... Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral, the second from Akira Kurosawa’s film Ikiru, the third from Susan Sontag’s notebooks. We could find many more examples. Why do we process this difficult thought so easily? Is that part of what it’s about?Oliver Hermanus’s new film, Living, is a brilliant treatment of this theme, an essay on its mixed familiarity and ...”

“... some of them might yield emendations. Pietro, Poliziano noted, helped him do this work. As Gareth Williams shows, Pietro also made a collation of his own, in some respects more detailed than the master’s, parts of which he would eventually publish. That Bembo wrote what his contemporaries thought to be convincing Ciceronian Latin was due in large part to ...”

“... he also notes the contributions of the historians E. Franklin Frazier (PhD Chicago 1931) and Eric Williams (PhD Oxford 1938), who taught at Howard before returning to Trinidad in the late 1940s. Of the main four, all but Tate – the first African-American woman to receive a PhD in this field – are today reasonably well known, something that can’t be said ...”

“... life. Here Tomalin makes some risky moves. Arbitrarily chosen characters from the novels – Lady Susan, Marianne Dashwood, Mary Crawford – speak for their author’s repressed desires. Unsupported guesses, strategically placed in the story, take the weight of the biographer’s argument. Of Austen’s first months in Bath, Tomalin remarks: ‘Jane was ...”

“... Here is a passage describing a crisis, late in Orwell’s life, when he was living in Jura. Susan Watson was a partly crippled woman who had come to look after him and his adopted son. All went well until Avril, Orwell’s sister, turned up and decided she wanted to stay. Susan Watson ‘may have felt overly sensitive ...”

“... the most admired by writers and critics. It wasn’t just the usual modernist suspects like Pound, Williams, Stevens and Marianne Moore who sang his praises, but other, very different kinds of poet too: Robert Graves, Dylan Thomas, Octavio Paz, Louis Zukofsky and Charles Olson. As did any number of critics: Edmund Wilson, Harry Levin, Jacques Barzun, Lionel ...”

“... in the parish of St Giles without Cripplegate, and a woman from Whitechapel called Frances Williams. The charge was fornication. Though not in itself unusual, the charge had an extra twist, repeated with minor variations in most of the entries relating to it: ‘they were all 4 seene in bed together at one tyme.’ The documentation is scanty, and we ...”

“... of a puritan-provincial ‘state of mind’ in tales that closely resemble my dream narrative. Susan Manning argues that themes of the pursuer becoming the pursued, of self-mirroring and doubling, of pilgrimages and impenetrable ‘centres’, are, in a special sense, Calvinistic, and reflect religious influences peculiarly strong in Scottish and American ...”

“... the most influential female political secretary until Harold Wilson’s right-hand woman Marcia Williams, but you would never know it from this book. Campbell’s single-minded concentration on the private also unintentionally makes Lloyd George what he never was in life: boring. Love letters are riveting when written to oneself, but except in the hands of ...”