“... for their supernatural powers, the benandanti, who fought only for ‘Christ’s faith’, were born to their profession. Every man whose mother had preserved the caul (the placenta) in which he was born and wore it about his neck was compelled to ‘go forth’ when called to defend the crops. These night battles did ...”

“... cannot excuse the bathos, as we lurch into pages of panegyric to William of Orange and Queen Anne and a parade of Whig politicians. For a biographer, Defoe’s own sense of the importance of what he wrote must matter a good deal. During most of his career as a writer, he was preoccupied with politics. He was almost 60 when he published his first ...”

“... things – the actual course of Leonardo’s childhood and contemporary modes of representing St Anne and the Virgin – appear particularly damaging. There is evidence to suggest that Leonardo was brought up from the beginning in his father’s house, and the cult of St Anne had already given rise to the Anna Matterza ...”

“... It is 1912, and Miranda Gay, one of Katherine Anne Porter’s versions of her younger self, is travelling to a family reunion in South Texas, in the country between Austin and San Antonio. She has made a rash early marriage and alienated herself from her family. She talks to an elderly woman cousin on the train, who bursts out: ‘Ah, the family … the whole hideous institution should be wiped from the face of the earth ...”

“... parts. The ‘master mistress’ of the poet’s passion should, according to Sonnet 20, have been born a woman. Unfortunately, great creating Nature fell in love with such perfect beauty and, being heterosexual herself,                by addition me of thee defeated, By adding one thing to my purpose nothing. Shakespeare’s better angel, as ...”

“... wrought only by the gifted and devoted, rather than something occasionally engaged in by the well-born and cultivated.That was a long time ago, and the ballet has continued to renew itself, certainly of late with cordial help from Modern Dance. In this century, it was not just Modern Dance, nor the renovated modern ballet, but the Great American Musical ...”

“... sense. As Barker-Benfield says, ‘the corollary of Locke’s assumption that human minds were born as if they were blank sheets of paper was the unleashing of the power to shape their own lives.’ You could shape the lives of others, too, particularly your children, by manipulating the influences upon the nerves and brain for good results; it was the ...”

“... Yalom shows, appropriate breast-styles for the nurse which were not those that applied to a high-born or beautiful young mother.) Classical medical theory supported the value of wet-nursing – Aristotle had thought the thin watery milk of the new mother was bad for babies. Husbands also found it more convenient to have their wives give the children to ...”

“... it was correct to base his caricatures on the available press caricatures: Randy Andy, the equine Anne, the hearty Philip, and so on. Correct to be obvious? Why could he not go for an inspired guess, a bold and mysterious speculation? James seemed, in his interview, to think that fantasising of this sort would be ‘gossip’ of the kind he (looking ...”

“... made it momentous. His confident wilfulness emerged very early, shaped by family circumstances. Born in 1812 (he was an exact contemporary of Dickens), Pugin was an only child, cherished and praised. He was the product of an unlikely alliance between Auguste Pugin, a Parisian illustrator who had escaped revolutionary chaos by moving to London in 1792, and ...”

“... attention in Handley’s account. And they read: aloud or silently, by moon or candlelight. Lady Anne Clifford had devout material read to her in bed by her servants, who noted down ‘things new and old, Sentences, or Sayings of remark, which she had read or learned out of Authors’ on small pieces of paper which were then pinned around her bedstead so ...”

“... some changes. He named Louise Duchess of Vaujours and acknowledged his surviving daughter, Marie-Anne de Bourbon. Marie-Anne was then brought up as a royal family member, though she and two siblings born later had no succession rights to the throne. The maîtresses en titre of the Sun ...”

“... theyre all very well in small quantities but not to be heaped on as one goes on.’ Burra was born in 1905, one year after Dalí, and brought up in Springfield Lodge, a good size house with a monkey puzzle tree in front and, before the Great War, as many as eight servants to hand. Springfield, near Rye, remained his home until he was in his late forties ...”

“... while she improvised the vivid stories one hoped she would write. Her real talent was akin to Anne Radcliffe, and she was born out of due time. All these people were segregated in self-conscious little groups. In London on more than one occasion in the Thirties, Virginia Woolf reported conversations with Tony ...”

“... torn apart by his dogs: ‘his horned head reared, streaming, from the ruck,/as if a god was being born.’ Robertson’s interest in unseeably awful scenes gives strength to his fine translation of Euripides’ The Bacchae (2014), in which Agave is inspired by Dionysus to tear her son Pentheus apart, and then enters, oblivious, while carrying his head. She is ...”