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“... secrets in the family past, several of which are told in Julia Copus’s new biography. Mew was born in 1869 into a Bloomsbury family that was just about respectable; her father, Fred, was an architect and had married his boss’s eldest daughter, Anna Maria, who apparently felt the union lowered her social rank. Neither Mew nor her siblings ever married ...”

“... carried the glamour and danger of scandal and shame, Dean and a local girl in her late teens, Anne-Marie, become lovers. The photographer, who narrates and, as he breaks off to explain to the reader, invents the details of Dean and Anne-Marie’s sexual journey, nonetheless frames the story in terms of his own ...”

“... The churches of my Irish Catholic childhood had no images of Eden. The idea that man was once born without sin had shrunk to the pinpoint of the Virgin Mary’s conception and there was no nakedness on display, with or without fig leaves, apart from the stripped and bloodied figure of the crucified Christ. ‘Why is Jesus wearing a nappy?’ a child asked ...”

“... body and to get the IRA to admit the truth about what it did has kept her alive. Jean Murray was born in 1935, the first of five children. The family lived in a tiny two-up two-down house owned by the Corporation in the heart of Protestant East Belfast. From the front door you can see the yellow cranes of the Harland and Wolff shipyard where Jean’s father ...”

“... appear in time for the anniversary of 1917, one assumes, but uncannily relevant to 2017. Teffi was born Nadezhda Alexandrovna Lokhvitskaya in 1872. Her father was a lawyer, criminology professor and editor of the Courts’ Gazette. Her three sisters were all published writers; the eldest, Maria, wrote bestselling but now forgotten Symbolist poetry and was ...”

“... about the age of twenty shows him in a Cavalier lace collar and a cloak lined with red. Anne Bateman, painted a year or so later, is also board- (and perhaps bored-) stiff. Five years on, in 1760, he painted William Brooke, four times Mayor of Doncaster: a mercer dressed in good brown velvet with a great belly swelling above spread knees, and arms ...”

“... crowd, it seems premature to proclaim a new era for Henry Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling. Tears, as Anne Vincent-Buffault suggests, have a rhetoric as well as a history, and shedding them while making war is not the same thing as weeping at the loss of a race – or even in defence of your wife, as Muskie did in 1972. Muskie’s tears were prompted by the ...”

“... humanity of ordinary babies or marvel at it. In a woodcut by Hans Baldung Grien, dated 1511, St Anne is fondling the infant’s genitalia, while he chucks the Virgin under the chin, an amorous gesture with a tradition going back to the Song of Songs (and here signifying their mystical marriage), while Joseph looks understandingly on. Steinberg (who throws ...”

“... his identity and whereabouts: ‘David Sumner, a.k.a. David Jones, lives in Aloha, Oregon. He was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and spent his childhood in England. His work has been published in Hawaii Review, Puerto del Sol, Mississippi Review, and many other magazines.’ One of Bowers’s letters reached the poetry editor of Seneca Review just as the ...”

“... shaky. All is not lost, though. What these writers have in common – Marianne Moore, Katherine Anne Porter, Rebecca West, P.L. Travers, Simone de Beauvoir, Elizabeth Bishop, Nadine Gordimer and Anne Sexton, who appear in the volume alongside the writers already mentioned – is that they are not men, which is not as ...”

“... was propaganda – a compromise he regretted nearly as soon as he’d written it. Dovlatov was born in 1941, the only child of a theatre director and an actress, and began writing just as Khrushchev’s thaw ended and censorship tightened once again. Editors praised his fiction, but couldn’t publish it; he earned money mostly as a journalist. His ...”

“... awareness that the ‘king bee’ was female coincided fortuitously with the reign of Queen Anne, enabling one Joseph Warder to publish, in 1712, his fawning book, The True Amazons, or The Monarchy of Bees: ‘I cannot but wish,’ he wrote, ‘that all your Majesty’s subjects were as unanimously loyal as the subjects of the Queen Bee, in whose Nature ...”

“... Who was this son? What did he represent? What was his legacy? In her illuminating book, Anne Rogerson focuses on Ascanius as a figure whose role in the chain of transmission and inheritance deserves more attention than it has so far received. In Virgil’s day he acquired a new importance, because the man who ruled the empire after the destruction ...”

“... Greifswald was.’ And then al-Jarrah met Sengün and, according to Assem, fell in love. A German-born daughter of Turkish immigrants, she was in Greifswald studying dentistry. Like him, she was tall, slim, athletic and fashionable; she wore high-heeled boots and jeans. They began to plan a life together. But according to a German intelligence report, at the ...”

“... 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 ...”