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“... point of entering the lists she does not yet appear to be regarded as a mistake of the calibre of Sarah Ferguson and Diana Spencer.The latter prompts Tina Brown to remark: ‘What a pity that the queen, so gifted at reading the bloodlines of horses, misread so profoundly the Spencers’ suitability to join with royal stock. Yes, in terms of pedigree, they ...”

“... on how best to irritate people, An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting (1753). After her death in 1755 it was considered a shame that she hadn’t tried writing something less rebarbative. Her younger brother Arthur ‘often lamented’, the 1804 editor of the Essay recalled, ‘that a sister possessing such amiable manners, and such ...”

“... with which Whedon investigated the emotional consequences of bad sex, the corporeal horror of a death in the family, small-town blood-sucking junkies and so on, are all a bit post-watershed BBC2 – Davies appears to have learned from Buffy’s post-Freudian way with a metaphor, finding the darkness and grandeur in everyday situations, animating and so ...”

“... in this language, there is no other source of mercy. She seems more pious in Irish and also more death-minded. The crick in her neck is a ‘camreilig’, meaning a twist or crook of the grave. There is nothing forced about the pathos and, in the lyricism, no sense of reach.Willie, played by Raymond Keane, crawls around the mound, grunting superbly, and I ...”

“... The story, as my grandmother always told it, was that her grandfather was pushed to his death down a liftshaft in Florence for the sake of his gold watch. It never occurred to me to wonder whether or not this was true. The events it related were too remote – a great-great-grandfather a hyphen too far. My grandmother’s grandfather was pushed to his death down a liftshaft in Florence for the sake of his gold watch in much the same way that Troy fell to a large wooden horse packed with Greeks ...”

“... sent between the Nashes and Carrington, and discovered in a trunk in a bread-oven after John’s death. Blythe edits deftly and writes at once intimately and with a feel for the broad historical pulse, and the text is illustrated with irresistible, virtuoso ‘Here’s me: and here’s how I see you’ comic pen drawings from the correspondents. In contrast ...”

“... from within. The next step probably lies, as Occupy did, outside conventional electoral politics. Sarah Jaffe’s Necessary Trouble provides the fullest account yet of the social movements that are attempting to transform American politics. ‘We needed something beyond the ballot box,’ she remembers thinking in 2008, but ‘it wasn’t clear what that ...”

“... definitions and differences in sense. The stories of these volunteers form the backbone of Sarah Ogilvie’s book.Murray edited the OED from his grandly named ‘Scriptorium’, which was in fact a large corrugated iron shed, built first in the grounds of Mill Hill School, where he taught, and then in his garden at 78 Banbury Road. He began working on ...”

“... back from one such dot on the map with what remained of a man who seemed to have been beaten to death, or near it, by more than one person. The victim had been an outsider, someone who’d turned up in town a few months earlier and got a job in the local pub. The story of his accidental fall was corroborated by everyone in the town and made no sense at all ...”

“... portraits from the whims and vagaries of ‘temporary fashion’. By the time of Reynolds’s death in 1792, ‘that bedgown’ had become the very height of fashion. The ‘robe à la grecque’, ‘empire style’, ‘neoclassical dress’ swept away the remnants of panniers and stomachers. Frankland’s watercolour for 1793 captured the vogue for long ...”

“... one of the Third Secretaries in the Chancery, became an admirer, friend and opponent at tennis of Sarah Bernhardt, of whom he later wrote a biography, and, though attracted to Catholicism, put off conversion from ‘sheer cowardice and fright of Uncle Tom’. It was not until 1909 that he defied family opinion and entered the Church. He later wrote of his ...”

“... out of obscurity: Luciana Berger, Chuka Umunna, Chris Leslie, Anna Soubry, Heidi Allen and Sarah Wollaston are in varying degrees familiar to politics-watchers – though none of them has enjoyed a distinguished ministerial career, or ever become a darling of the party membership. But this no longer matters. All of them – Shukers as well as Chukas ...”

“... In a letter of 1911 he told her that ‘I used to follow you ardently.’ But after her death Braddon’s reputation declined, along with the reputations of many other innovative Victorian women writers. When I was researching her work in the early 1970s her books were out of print. Dover Books brought out a paperback edition of Lady Audley’s ...”

“... and have now come in from the cold. These include Rudy Giuliani, Newt Gingrich, John Bolton and Sarah Palin. All of them are touted as potential cabinet appointees but all of them have enemies among the Republicans in the Senate who could block their bids for office and return them to permanent vacation as back-up commentators on Fox News. The fate of these ...”

“... to produce, Moira Demos and Laura Ricciardi minutely reconstruct the investigation of Halbach’s death. In particular, their series explores the possibility that the police framed Steven Avery for the killing and obtained a false confession from Brendan Dassey. The show has been a huge hit. It so moved and angered its audience that in January 2016, a few ...”