“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... about the age of twenty shows him in a Cavalier lace collar and a cloak lined with red. Anne Bateman, painted a year or so later, is also board- (and perhaps bored-) stiff. Five years on, in 1760, he painted William Brooke, four times Mayor of Doncaster: a mercer dressed in good brown velvet with a great belly swelling above spread knees, and arms ...”

“... crowd, it seems premature to proclaim a new era for Henry Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling. Tears, as Anne Vincent-Buffault suggests, have a rhetoric as well as a history, and shedding them while making war is not the same thing as weeping at the loss of a race – or even in defence of your wife, as Muskie did in 1972. Muskie’s tears were prompted by the ...”

“... humanity of ordinary babies or marvel at it. In a woodcut by Hans Baldung Grien, dated 1511, St Anne is fondling the infant’s genitalia, while he chucks the Virgin under the chin, an amorous gesture with a tradition going back to the Song of Songs (and here signifying their mystical marriage), while Joseph looks understandingly on. Steinberg (who throws ...”