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“... consider Claudine de Tencin, daughter of a provincial judge who sent her to a nunnery. After his death she sued to gain release from her vows, moved to Paris, and in a startlingly short time became one of the grand literary hostesses of Paris, as well as mistress to the prime minister and several other leading figures. She used her political influence to ...”

“... wrote a note, rearranged the family photographs on the mantelpiece and hanged himself. Curtis’s death was inevitably seen as authenticating his dark lyrics, though at the time the content of the lyrics hadn’t been clear even to those close to the band. In 1978, Morley wrote that he had given up trying to make out the words (he blamed ‘the perils of fast ...”

“... and Culture of Pregnancy (2018), Garbes drew attention to America’s relatively high maternal death rate: ‘I’m not trying to scare you unnecessarily. While death in pregnancy and childbirth is rare here, it is nowhere close to rare enough.’ Every year, Garbes noted, between 700 and 900 Americans die in ...”

“... covered in earth’. Missing in the photographs is his hair colour. In 1896, crushing heavily on Sarah Bernhardt (she had dazzled him at her salon, reclining on a polar bear pelt next to her pet lion), Renard told her that before age and experience turned him blond, he was ‘a redhead, once, downright ginger and frankly vicious’. We hear about this in his ...”

“... to the tragedy and therefore fails to account for Koresh’s hold over his followers. Preacher of Death has the advantage of Marc Breault’s contribution. Breault, a senior member of the Branch Davidians who defected in 1989, was the prime instigator of the legal moves that culminated in the ATF raid last February. Martin King, an Australian television ...”

“... be gracious, she could be businesslike, she could be ruthless; it is said she sometimes signs death warrants with her own hand … Strangely enough, I have never heard anybody comment on her perfume. It is the most delicious either of us has ever smelled. She had what appears to have been a one-night stand with Wendell Willkie, Roosevelt’s Republican ...”

“... the Act of Settlement settled little, except the succession in the House of Hanover upon Anne’s death without issue, and it affected Anne not at all, since most of its other provisions were either soon repealed, or were not scheduled to come into operation until after her death, or simply formalised existing practice and ...”

“... artificial boundary’ between medieval and early modern: it opens and closes with the death in 1553 of Edward VI, the attempted coup of Lady Jane Grey and the accession of Mary Tudor, whose brief reign prepared the way for Elizabeth. In order to rule England, these women had to act with firmness, decision and, if necessary, brutality: they had, in ...”

“... four men in suits, one of whom was reading out my letter. It explained that due to the recent death of my father, and the heavy business related to the tidying up of his estate, I had fallen behind in the paying of my taxes. I was truly sorry to have found myself in this position but the last three months had been a period of grief and shock as well as ...”

“... called ‘a wonder’. In Careless People, her new book on the writing of The Great Gatsby, Sarah Churchwell proceeds with a sturdy working theory: that it helps to understand and appreciate the book if you know what went into it. She’s not thinking about all the social and intellectual ferment of Fitzgerald’s early life that made him the man and ...”

“... so ensuring a small measure of – fragmentary – survival. There was to be no coming back after death as an entity; the posthumous condition that Barthes imagined for himself was a sociable version of the one he had sought to inflict most unsociably on the humanist notion of the integral Author. In S/Z, the integral or notional Balzac is separated out ...”

“... Chapman Brothers are there, and Sam Taylor-Wood (as was), as well as the jeweller Shaun Leane, and Sarah Burton, who would take over the label after his death and made Kate Middleton’s wedding dress. All McQueen’s earliest associates seemed to have stayed with him the whole way: this was a family business built around a ...”

“... of his wife). It was here that she wrote her memoirs, and remained until Charles-Emmanuel’s death three years later. She then settled in London, where she became a colourful figure at the court of Charles II, her other early soupirant, and then James II, remaining there for the rest of her life. In the meantime the duc de Mazarin continued his ...”

“... was solemnised by Southey and Coleridge in joint marriage to a pair of sisters, Edith and Sarah Fricker – a lucky shot for Southey, very much less so for Coleridge. The commune that never took shape is now embalmed in a few poems and the Platonic heat of a frank correspondence; but the friends worked steadily in Bristol in 1795, from an energy of ...”

“... skeletal face’ as Deedes ‘lifted his glass of water and sipped it’. Thirteen years after his death she is still chewing over this ‘unpleasant’ encounter which she now attributes to Deedes’s own ‘twilight relationship’ with a much younger writer at the paper. In fact, she had simply dealt the wrong card. She played ...”