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“... the king had her stuffed. Exotic beasts didn’t always find such favour. When Lady Lisle gave Anne Boleyn a monkey in 1534, she wasn’t pleased. ‘As to touching your monkey,’ John Hussee wrote to Lisle the following year, ‘of a truth, madam, the queen loveth no such beasts nor can scarce abide the sight of them.’ What happened to the monkey ...”

“... she spoke always of liberty. The woman whom the press called Théroigne de Méricourt was born Anne-Josèphe Terwagne, in the village of Marcourt, not far from Liège. She was therefore not a Frenchwoman, but a subject of the Emperor of Austria. Her family were of peasant stock, but comfortably-off. The train of disasters in her life began when she was ...”

“... Paul Simon and Joan Baez – and those only in indifferent Portuguese translations. Most of their power and all of their subtlety would vanish. For similar reasons, the troubadours have more often been honoured as cultural pioneers than admired as poets. Moreover, since they worked with a limited number of motifs and achieved their effects more through ...”

“... at least (and portraits were Wright’s bread and butter), it lacked the suavity, the power to project fantasy without losing likeness, which was the achievement of more fashionable and upper-class 18th-century face-painting. If Gainsborough had developed the neat manner of Mr and Mrs Andrews, rather than a feathery allusiveness of touch, he too ...”

“... Pope made his print debut in the 1709 miscellany, which also contained work by rising names like Anne Finch and Jonathan Swift. His sumptuous editions of classical poets in Latin or English (Catullus, Horace, Juvenal, Lucretius, Ovid, Virgil) cast reflected glory on his vernacular list. When an ambitious Oxford graduate called Basil Kennett told Tonson in ...”

“... The wedding was like a dream outside her power, or like a show unmanaged by her in which she was to have no part. The Member of the Wedding How to account for the vagaries of literary reputation? In the Forties and early Fifties, such disparate, talented young writers as Carson McCullers, Truman Capote and Flannery O’Connor were perceived as kindred; there was a highly publicised vogue of American Southern Gothic writing, abetted by photographs of the very camp Truman Capote reclining on a chaise-longue like a delicious dream of Oscar Wilde’s, and by lurid tales of the erratic, often inebriated behaviour of Carson McCullers, a literary prodigy to set beside Scott Fitzgerald in the previous generation ...”

“... he began planning another attempt. Suárez, as Cercas lovingly describes him, was an ‘ascetic of power’ who lived for politics, so the country was flabbergasted when, on 29 January 1981, he announced his resignation, a tactical retreat, Cercas suggests, the better to make his political comeback. The resignation did nothing to deter the golpistas, who by ...”

“... to reinforce the reputation of ‘the Palladium of public credit’. It is at this point that Anne Murphy takes her bird’s eye view of a day in the life of the bank. In her acknowledgments she expresses some apprehension about having plumped for this approach, but she need not have worried. This is a model of economic history, acute, profound and ...”

“... very strong condemnation in Islam) and of lining their own pockets. The US ambassador, Anne Patterson (fresh from a stint in Pakistan), had hoped that Morsi would be an Egyptian Erdoğan, but quite apart from the fact that the model was losing his shine, the history and political dynamics of the two countries are very different. Snubbed by ...”

“... at me’. Both James in his stories and Thomas Mann in The Magic Mountain (1924) understood the power which ghosts and séance scenes held in the imaginations of their readers. During the First World War, as Maddox says, ‘grieving millions turned to the spiritualist movement, searching for messages from their lost men.’ Arthur Conan Doyle wrote: ‘I ...”

“... tried to anaesthetise politics, to turn the state into a work of art in order to legitimise their power’ – and adds that this ‘process’ was ‘already in evidence’ in the Court masques of the Renaissance. The masque-loving king of Sidney’s Arcadia is thought guilty by Norbrook of ‘irresponsible absolutism’, but it is absenteeism, not ...”

“... medium had been the body in its immediate time and space, the tools of any performer. Despite the power of her invention, she left behind works essentially without texts, along with a few members of her original group whose minds and bodies bear her distinctive imprint, and a generation of ageing folk who lamely say: ‘You should have seen her.’ When these ...”

“... Thatcher and Helmut Kohl). He also conducted interviews with Mitterrand’s wife, Danielle, and Anne Pingeot, his long-time mistress. The result is a rich, detailed and dependable biography, framed as a ‘study in ambiguity’. Who was Mitterrand? Was he really a man of the left? Did he have any strong beliefs at all? Was he really the most successful ...”

“... Oxford, Brighton and Glasgow in the rankings of pro-EU vote share. But its Conservative MP, Anne Main, is strongly pro-Brexit, and I was curious to see which way people are likely to jump come the next, surely imminent election.By chance, in between visits to St Albans, business took me to other Remainian strongholds. After Bath, Edinburgh and St Albans ...”

“... civic worthy and falling into debt. In 1582, at the age of 18, Shakespeare married the 26-year-old Anne Hathaway. By 1592 he was in London, and by the mid-to-late 1590s had become a ‘sharer’ (profit-sharing partner) in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. As a result of the commercial success of the company he was able in 1597 to buy New Place, one of the ...”