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“... work concerns death and poverty, oppression and rebellion. Are those subjects taboo?Kollwitz was born Käthe Schmidt in Königsberg in 1867. As a young woman she studied art, in part because her father thought her too homely to attract a husband. In 1886 she lived for a while in Berlin, where she married Karl Kollwitz, a doctor for the Tailors’ Union and a ...”

“... expert in horse-drawn hoes, seed drills and threshing machines, that day he introduced us to a man born into the wrong religion and given an imperfect education, an author of unlikely novels and unlikelier cheques, sniffed at by the upper classes when he arrived at their dinner tables and baited by the mob when he asked for their votes. I remember most clearly ...”

“... Henrietta Maria in Yellow (1636), for which she posed while six months pregnant with Princess Anne, he gives the queen a languorous aspect by painting her from below, exaggerating her height: compare this to Daniël Mytens’s portraits, in which her weak chin, large nose and limp curls are undisguised. No wonder Charles I gave Mytens the boot when Van ...”

“... tighter than ever – and the painters of altarpieces in the diocese of Milan where Caravaggio was born were instructed and their works inspected with special rigour – a new freedom began to be possible in art intended for the collector’s gallery, where originality was not ‘ferociously punished or condemned to silence’, as Robb would have us believe ...”

“... differently, we may well ask whether we are abroad if we visit the England of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. In September 1528, Henry wrote to Anne: ‘No more to you at this present, mine own darling, for lack of time, but that I would you were in mine arms or I in yours, for I think it long since I kissed you.’ This ...”

“... opera, Jane Boleyn is more often known as Jane Rochford, wife of George Boleyn, sister-in-law to Anne the queen. There are some lives we read backwards, from bloody exit to obscure entrance, and Jane’s is one of them. She was beheaded in 1542, with Henry VIII’s fifth queen, Catherine Howard. She was one of Catherine’s ladies, and for reasons which ...”

“... sense than Sillitoe of the wool-gathering, homespun poetry of the masculine adventurer, the free-born Englishman for whom (in one of Cullen’s striking anachronisms) this is still a ‘cosy and exciting country to live in’. Sillitoe has a nice ear for English place-names: there are high jinks at Doggerel Bank, Back Enderby, Peppercorn Cottage and Upper ...”

“... familiar. Between 1963 and 1970, she had been treated three times a week by a psychoanalyst named Anne Darquier, to whom she had become very close, and who had probably committed suicide. Were they related? They were, and for more than three decades Callil, conscious of a need to discharge a debt as both a patient and a friend, pursued Darquier, Vichy’s ...”

“... Anne Serre​ was ten when her mother died in 1971. She claims to have no memory of the preceding years. ‘My father sank into a depression,’ she told the White Review in 2020, ‘and my sisters and I … tried with all our might – like all children in this type of situation, I think – to protect him, resuscitate him ...”

“... There will be many who will find it significant that Anne Whitmarsh, beginning a careful and detailed study of Simone de Beauvoir with a section called ‘Biographical Notes’, should make the first entry read, ‘1905 21 June: Jean-Paul Sartre born in Paris’, and the last: ‘1980: Death of Sartre ...”

“... Tate Modern’s retrospective of the Brazilian artist Mira Schendel – born Myrrha Dagmar Dub in 1919 in Zurich, brought up in Italy, uprooted by war to Yugoslavia, and from there to Brazil in 1949 – is moving, difficult, full of strange writing and immediate visual pleasure.* Schendel was an intellectual, feeding on Wittgenstein and Cardinal Newman (her two incompatible heroes), as well as a constant innovator in formal terms ...”

“... is an ambiguous female, who must have been lower class if she grovelled so flatteringly to the low-born Nell Gwynn. It has been suggested elsewhere that Aphra Behn had some connections with Kentish gentry, but Greer will have none of it: ‘It is more likely that Mrs Behn’s was a milieu without social status: possibly an émigré community, perhaps Jewish or ...”

“... Lady​ Anne Glenconner has lived her life ‘in the shadow of the crown’. She is a friend of many members of the royal family and was, for thirty years, a lady in waiting to Princess Margaret. Her memoir, however, is written in the shadow of The Crown, ‘the popular Netflix series’ in which she was played by Nancy Carroll with Helena Bonham Carter as Margaret ...”

“... She was born round the corner in an attic. Balancing chemistry textbooks on her feet, her father pushed the ivory five-foot pram down the middle. ‘He thought you were immortal’ says her mother. Later she daggered sticks along immaculate black railings. Today it is a psalm with each brass doorbell, every blue-rinsed concierge, daily bland against the rush of last hopes ...”

“... religiosity as the serpent. In East Village the miseries of adolescence are apocalyptic. Like all born-again Christians, Mennonites see sin everywhere, even in newborns, who, if they die in infancy, are spared damnation only because, unaware of their fallen condition, they cannot repent it. With puberty, when free will kicks in, this probationary state of ...”