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“... wished for a boy – a wish that was even more evident when her sister Hélène, or Poupette, was born. Two days a week she went to a private Catholic school, Le Cours Désir (her mother’s influence), and she liked reading more than anything else (her father’s). ‘I was a madly gay little girl,’ she writes, though what I noticed most in her description ...”

“... may be a trans man or identify as non-binary.Recently, in Sweden, for the first time a baby was born to a woman whose pregnancy was made possible by transplanting her mother’s uterus into her body – the baby gestated in the same womb that had gestated the baby’s mother. In 2018, in Brazil, for the first time a baby was ...”

“... that deal directly with life and death struggles in colonial Africa.Marguerite Sarah Ducados was born in 1929 in the Gers, in south-west France, where her mother worked as a maid. Her father was a black Frenchman from Guadeloupe, who died when she was young. She was one of four children in a single-parent family and spent periods in an orphanage. By the ...”

“... in case de Staël’s vengeance should light on them. Meanwhile, he appealed to his generous aunt, Anne de Nassau, to write to de Staël, begging her to give him his freedom. ‘He has been weak enough to put up with that servitude out of consideration for the pain you claim to be suffering and your histrionic grief,’ Madame de Nassau wrote. It was a good ...”

“... her famous journey to Hail in Nejd (northern Arabia), unvisited by a European woman since Lady Anne Blunt had been there in 1878. She went to seek respite from her passionate but unconsummated love affair with Richard Doughty-Wylie (nephew of the great explorer Charles Doughty), whom she had met when he was British Consul in Konya. Doughty-Wylie was ...”

“... tang of the hot dog and pizza concession under the hot yellow lights.’‘One’, the Princess Anne pronoun, is a rare visitor to contemporary literary prose, not only because of its air of neutral authority – it’s just the sort of thing that makes the editorial blue pencil itch. By disowning subjectivity it more or less disqualifies itself, yet ...”

“... outset, is that it reduces the story of Europe to a pious recitation of how the European Union was born, ate its spinach and grew up to be big and strong. That version inevitably treats contemporary history east of the Elbe and south-east of Vienna as a series of bolt-ons, pausing from time to time to insert sections about the Hungarian Revolution or the ...”

“... II, on whose death in 1488 the duchy was absorbed into France with the marriage of his daughter Anne to two successive Valois kings. It was there, in rather obscure circumstances, that Henri IV issued the famous edict which brought the Wars of Religion to a close. There, too, the young Louis XIV staged the arrest of Fouquet, the overmighty minister he ...”

“... eye. ‘Between the ANC and oblivion stood the lone and battered figure of Winnie Mandela,’ Anne Marie du Preez Bezdrob wrote in Winnie Mandela: A Life (2004). The pathos of individual heroism became a defining feature of Winnie Mandela’s life, but the same was true of the ANC, a moribund organisation until the freedom fighters of the Soweto ...”

“... project. The gap isn’t clearly explained. In Autumn, Knausgaard’s fourth daughter is not yet born, but by Summer Anne is talking. Autumn and Winter list months, but don’t attach a year to them. The first full date the reader is given is in the epilogue of Spring: ‘Today is Wednesday the 13th of April 2016 … and I ...”

“... about including Burns’s Scottish dialect). He included nothing medieval (none of his poets was born before the 1550s), and, after a minor tussle with Tennyson, excluded anyone who was still alive in 1861. There were no Americans or other writers from outside the British Isles. Formally, he narrowed things down, too. Though its sense of what constituted a ...”

“... Elif Batuman, Edna Bonhomme, Hazel V. Carby, Linda Colley, Meehan Crist, Anne Enright, Lorna Finlayson, Lisa Hallgarten and Jayne Kavanagh, Sophie Lewis, Maureen N. McLane, Erin Maglaque, Gazelle Mba, Azadeh Moaveni, Toril Moi, Joanne O’Leary, Niela Orr, Lauren Oyler, Susan Pedersen, Jacqueline Rose, Madeleine Schwartz, Arianne Shahvisi, Sophie Smith, Rebecca Solnit, Alice Spawls, Amia Srinivasan, Chaohua Wang, Marina Warner, Bee Wilson, Emily Witt Elif BatumanWhen​ Roe v ...”

“... excuse for favouring my sister, saying that my father had so totally appropriated me, their first-born, with his adoration that, when they had a second child, she had no alternative to loving her more than he did and more than she did me. She was so blithely innocent about normal human feelings that, all her life, when questioned about her maternal ...”

“... in one chapter to Burnley, in the next to Barnsley, and poor at sums. He gives the age of Olivier, born in 1907, as 39 when he achieved his triumph as Richard III in 1944. Tarquin Olivier, born in 1936, is credited with a visit at the age of seven to Notley Abbey, bought by his father in 1945. Nor has Holden checked all the ...”

“... a small Vogue ‘library’, in order to start at the beginning. The beginning. British Vogue was born in September 1916, when German U-boats (really quite chic in their way – silver-blue with muscular lines) prevented the Americans from transporting their edition to British shores. Muir, in his catalogue introduction, points out that Vogue’s inception ...”