“... 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 ...”

“... as a distinct field of study. Academic disciplines are social phenomena in their own right, born of epistemological breaks, gradually acquiring a place in the history of learning and undergoing the experience of institutionalisation. They pass along their roads to Damascus and, though the character of their conversions will vary, the degree of ...”

“... Charlotte and Branwell, appointed themselves historians of the African empire of Angria; Emily and Anne broke away to chronicle the development of Gondal, a loose confederation of far-flung Pacific territories. Both teams put the stress on sexual and political intrigue: on seduction, betrayal, conspiracy, imprisonment, exile, violent death. Emily’s lengthy ...”

“... secrets in the family past, several of which are told in Julia Copus’s new biography. Mew was born in 1869 into a Bloomsbury family that was just about respectable; her father, Fred, was an architect and had married his boss’s eldest daughter, Anna Maria, who apparently felt the union lowered her social rank. Neither Mew nor her siblings ever married ...”

“... personal history – because the narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, is an American-Jewish writer, my age, born in Newark, whose earliest writing elicits a protest from some Jewish readers. But as a matter of fact, that about constitutes the similarity between my history and Zuckerman’s in that book. The unsettling opposition from his father that young Zuckerman ...”

“... carried the glamour and danger of scandal and shame, Dean and a local girl in her late teens, Anne-Marie, become lovers. The photographer, who narrates and, as he breaks off to explain to the reader, invents the details of Dean and Anne-Marie’s sexual journey, nonetheless frames the story in terms of his own ...”

“... The churches of my Irish Catholic childhood had no images of Eden. The idea that man was once born without sin had shrunk to the pinpoint of the Virgin Mary’s conception and there was no nakedness on display, with or without fig leaves, apart from the stripped and bloodied figure of the crucified Christ. ‘Why is Jesus wearing a nappy?’ a child asked ...”

“... appear in time for the anniversary of 1917, one assumes, but uncannily relevant to 2017. Teffi was born Nadezhda Alexandrovna Lokhvitskaya in 1872. Her father was a lawyer, criminology professor and editor of the Courts’ Gazette. Her three sisters were all published writers; the eldest, Maria, wrote bestselling but now forgotten Symbolist poetry and was ...”

“... body and to get the IRA to admit the truth about what it did has kept her alive. Jean Murray was born in 1935, the first of five children. The family lived in a tiny two-up two-down house owned by the Corporation in the heart of Protestant East Belfast. From the front door you can see the yellow cranes of the Harland and Wolff shipyard where Jean’s father ...”

“... Greifswald was.’ And then al-Jarrah met Sengün and, according to Assem, fell in love. A German-born daughter of Turkish immigrants, she was in Greifswald studying dentistry. Like him, she was tall, slim, athletic and fashionable; she wore high-heeled boots and jeans. They began to plan a life together. But according to a German intelligence report, at the ...”

“... was propaganda – a compromise he regretted nearly as soon as he’d written it. Dovlatov was born in 1941, the only child of a theatre director and an actress, and began writing just as Khrushchev’s thaw ended and censorship tightened once again. Editors praised his fiction, but couldn’t publish it; he earned money mostly as a journalist. His ...”

“... Who was this son? What did he represent? What was his legacy? In her illuminating book, Anne Rogerson focuses on Ascanius as a figure whose role in the chain of transmission and inheritance deserves more attention than it has so far received. In Virgil’s day he acquired a new importance, because the man who ruled the empire after the destruction ...”