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“... biography, Testament of Friendship, Vera’s tribute, published five years after Winifred’s death at the age of 37 and, like Brittain’s earlier volume of memoirs, Testament of Youth, never since out of print. And then in the 1970s, that celebration by the women’s movement of this shining example of sisterhood and of the struggles of our great ...”

“... lawyer specialising in medical malpractice suits. The event that changed Edwards’s life was the death of his teenage son, Wade, in a road accident in 1996. His response to this tragedy was to spend a chunk of his personal fortune getting himself elected to the US Senate for his home state of North Carolina, though not before he had enhanced that fortune by ...”

“... people died during the massacre, which became known as ‘the wild action’, but Schulz’s death was not random. He had come under the protection of a Gestapo officer who admired one of his pictures. The Gestapo officer gave him a pass out of the ghetto. Returning from an expedition in search of bread, Schulz was shot by a member of the SS as an act of ...”

“... with dignity. I just knew that no one would ever be turned away.’ The centre’s director, Sarah Blyth, couldn’t help Letts and her friend, but listened while Letts talked about her son.The story was familiar. Vancouver is one of the cities worst hit by the opioid crisis – almost seven people die here every day from overdoses. Across British ...”

“... Library. It is about three o’clock in the afternoon, on a steel-grey day two weeks after the death of Damilola Taylor. The centre of Peckham is thronged with police officers, all wearing high-visibility luminous yellow vests, and with equipment strapped around their waists on webbing belts, inflating the clothing around their upper bodies. I ask again ...”

“... then in force. Here comes the difference. The young woman who leaked the Cruise missile document, Sarah Tisdall, was prosecuted under the Act and sent to prison for six months. Leon Brittan was not prosecuted. He was knighted and later appointed as European Commissioner. Collette Bowe (who, after all, was only carrying out orders) was not prosecuted. She kept ...”

“... clever, frequently cloying. The story it tells is that of the life and aesthetically pleasing death by suicide of Edwin, 11-year-old author of Cartoons, a novel, we are told, of genius. It is also that of Edwin’s biographer, Jeffrey, a mere half-year older, whose exhaustively solemn record of his lifelong friend’s minutest peculiarities and ...”

“... year, having composed an ode celebrating the Jameson Raid and the well-known lines on the death of Edward VII. Along the electric wires the message came, He is no better, he is much the same. That at least is funny – indeed positively good in its way – and preferable to the era of Ghastly Good Taste in public verses that was to follow. Even ...”

“... to works in prose: Ros Barber’s The Marlowe Papers took the Desmond Elliott Prize in 2013 and Sarah Crossan’s One (about conjoined twins) carried off the Carnegie in 2016. These are good omens for The Long Take, which has been long-listed for the Man Booker this year. The Long Take is not just a verse novel, it’s a historical verse novel set in the ...”

“... his argument for yet another biography on the view he claims the world has had of her since her death as ‘a Diana before Diana’. This is a pitch of sorts, sure enough, but what grips me is why he would want to do it. Imagine making the effort to think of a reason to write a biography of Princess Margaret. Imagine committing months of working life to ...”

“... and glamour. Diana’s dresses, exhibited at Kensington Palace more than twenty years after her death, still drew the crowds. Last year Prince Charles came higher than David Gandy and David Beckham in GQ’s rankings for best-dressed Briton. The queen has been a global celebrity longer than anyone anywhere.The contract between the royal family and the ...”

“... young women with a blade hidden in the tripod and recording their expressions at the moment of death. Mark himself was used by his camera-obsessed father, who particularly enjoyed capturing ‘the reactions of the nervous system to fear’. In a home movie of Mark as a child, Powell appears as the tyrant father and his son as Mark. Powell implicates ...”

“... departments to pledge to improve the proportion of women in ‘leadership’ positions. As Sarah Banet-Weiser observes, the rhetoric of female ‘empowerment’ is now a standard marketing tool. Feminism hasn’t just acquired establishment approval, it has managed to become voguish. As Banet-Weiser puts it, we are ‘living in a moment in North ...”

“... and Randolph was barred, for a time, from all social occasions of political significance. Sarah Churchill lived on an emotional high-wire as an actress, and Diana committed suicide in the last year of Churchill’s life. Only Mary, with her husband Christopher Soames, provided a sheet-anchor of stability. Where Churchill’s public life is ...”

“... in the second of his sonnets for Jarrell, the one that restages his friend’s peculiar death (Jarrell was sideswiped by a car in the course of an evening walk): black-gloved, black-coated, you plod out stubbornly as if in lockstep to grasp your blank not-I at the foot of the tunnel … as if asleep, Child Randall, greeting the car, and approving ...”