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“... to ours except that Queen Elizabeth has borne five children, the extra one being the second-born Prince Richard, Duke of Sussex. Now that he has grown up, who of his three differently-unsuitable ladies will Richard marry? The aristocrat with the mad mother, the American who takes drugs or the black one? Unlike the Prince of Wales, Richard is not ...”

“... divinity of Lenin himself is being questioned, there is more than a whiff of the death of Queen Anne about Rybakov’s revelation that Stalin was a bloodthirsty and paranoiac tyrant. And though the portrayal of Stalin and his entourage is detailed and convincing, it lacks the sinister power of Solzhenitsyn’s version. Indeed, in form – though not of ...”

“... word failure fled into my      dictionary one page after facetious, I thought of you. Though Anne Sexton is more often invoked, The Book of Demons touches on the kinds of personal misery and breakdown that are also to be found in Sylvia Plath. The paranoid fantasies of the addict in forced recovery transform the hospital staff into ...”

“... class, social behaviour and sexual morality matter in 1939, in ways incomprehensible to those born into a freer society; the murder and the motive, the narrator emphasises, were ‘of their time, rooted in their time’, and impossible to imagine in a different period. What do we have? Faith Longley, thirty-odd years on, recreating her wartime sojourns ...”

“... says the author. He is not a man to let a symbol give him the slip. The unblushing bride was born in 1958. Her mother, also called Madonna, was a French-Canadian X-ray technician; her father, the son of Italian immigrants, was an engineer. The family was large but affluent, and Madonna grew up in pleasant suburbs: the blue-collar upbringing she claims ...”

“... it put her next to someone with ‘a strong breath’. The chaplain to James I’s wife, Queen Anne, held that of ‘all the noisome scents, there is none so rammish and so intolerable as that which proceeds from man’s body … I will not speak of his filth issuing from his eares, his eyes, nostrils, mouth, navel, and the uncleane parts.’ Even Jacobean ...”

“... London, were the new industrial ones. Analysing fertility and mortality rates, Simon Szreter and Anne Hardy judge that in places such as these the 1830s and 1840s were probably the ‘worst ever decades for life expectancy since the Black Death’; and they repaint the ever pathetic picture of ‘relentless youthfulness’, of a ‘proliferation of hordes of ...”

“... drive to self-immolation. Charlotte’s Villette is full of such erotic perversities. Apart from Anne Brontë’s writings, there is nothing moderate or middle of the road about these extremist fictions. They do not fit easily with the mainstream English novel from Austen and Thackeray to George Eliot and Henry James. The Brontës are a long way from the ...”

“... Ireland was a logocentric culture, in which print proved something of an enigma. The Irish-born Sterne was intrigued by the way in which uniform, anonymous black marks on a page could incarnate the living word. He was aware of the way the linear nature of both print and narrative flatten out the simultaneity of experience. Joyce himself was struck by ...”

“... simple experiment in a field outside Daventry that aircraft could be detected by radio. Radar was born. Remarkably, it was only two years after this that Lindemann demonstrated to Churchill that tinfoil strips cut to a certain length and jettisoned from a height would simulate aircraft on the enemy’s radar screen and baffle anti-aircraft ...”

“... capitalised Ward in the ominously capitalised Hospital. She’s on familiar turf: she was born there and it’s where she delivered her three sons with fairy-tale dispatch. It was also the site of many unpleasant physical examinations: her bowels, her ovarian cyst. Nine years before the novel begins, she gave birth to a fourth child at the Hospital, a ...”

“... February 1615 aboard the East India Company’s new ship the Lion, and returned, in command of the Anne Royal, to the Downs in September 1619. He had previously held a household position under Elizabeth I; travelled from La Coruña to Valladolid as part of the delegation sent by James VI and I to ratify an Anglo-Spanish alliance in 1605; commanded an ...”

“... journey, before her prize of being proposed to by the clever, funny, entertaining, well-born and even well-off Henry Tilney, in himself the strongest contrast to Brandon and Ferrars. And yet it is a mark of his moral integrity that he proposes to Catherine (we are told clearly) out of kindness and gratitude, and remorse at his father’s ...”

“... to set the record straight about ‘the diva myth that has followed me all my life’.She was born Barbara Joan Streisand in 1942 in Brooklyn. Her mother, Diana Rosen, was a gifted singer; Streisand never shook the feeling that her mother was jealous of her. When she was fifteen months old her father, Emanuel, died of a seizure at a summer camp in the ...”

“... that peaked in the 1880s and 1890s. Orthography became important: Geoffrey or Jeffrey, Ann or Anne, Stephen or Steven. Girls’ names were especially given to whim and proliferation. In the 1930s, my mother was christened Doreen because a Russian acquaintance of my grandfather said that was the name of the nicest girl he had ever known. This nice Doreen ...”