“... against backdrops of crenellated castles, jungles, battlefields. In the pages of the magazines my mother took, I followed the lives of divas, queens and stars; one of these was the pictorial weekly Oggi, modelled on Life, but also a harbinger of Hello! in its lurid curiosity about its rich, mostly doomed subjects. The women who appeared in its pages were ...”

“... when Nikki was killed – but born into different worlds. She had been in care, and was a single mother with four girls: Stacey, eight, Zara, three, and Niomi, nearly two, as well as Nikki. I had gone to university and was recklessly ambitious. I had hesitated before knocking on her door that first time. But I took to Sharon, whose prickly exterior is a ...”

“... crossings out, second and third thoughts, and sideways writing in the margins, were given to my mother to type. They would be revised and typed again and again.’ Transposing the usual location of domestic equipment, the Pritchetts lived out an Upstairs, Downstairs version of the literary life: he, upstairs, rolling out the sentences on the pastry ...”

“... and then, still convalescent from illness, only because of an aberrant desire to meet the young Queen Elizabeth during her tour of the Antipodes in 1954. She charmed him. Stricken by remorse for a lifetime of stiffnecked pride, he dragged himself again from his sickbed on the following Sunday to seek forgiveness at the ...”

“... The young duchess was captivated by her new house guest. His conversation, Georgiana told her mother, ‘is like a brilliant player at billiards, the strokes follow one another piff paff’. For his part, Fox was enamoured of his hostess and the splendour of her house in equal measure, but the conversational billiard game underway in her drawing room gave ...”

“... grief was widely seen as excessive, but he had also lost a brother, two infant sons and his mother at around the same time. Grief, however, didn’t stand in the way of remarriage. When Gaunt married Constance of Castile and, after her death, his long-term mistress, Katherine Swynford, the children of all three unions – as well as Katherine’s by her ...”

“... was so recognised until the run ended with William McKie, knighted after he had conducted at Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation in 1953.The person to whom most credit should go for moderating this traditional prejudice and opening the door to a new era of composition was an Irishman. Stanford was born in Dublin in 1852 ...”

“... I’d take the blighters by surprise. ‘Here we are. Fat Pig One and Fat Pig Two.’ Said by my mother when she and my father were sitting on the sofa in front of the fire. ‘They have one of them dogs that’s never got its snitch out of its backside.’ My father. 11 January. To Cambridge, where I talk to students about my medical history. It’s part ...”

“... arena of healthcare financing. All told, the price of my care was about twice my widowed mother’s annual salary as a grocery store cashier. How was it paid, given that in 1988 she, like all but one of her six children, was a student? By the private health insurance provided to students at Harvard. It covered most of the bills, though I was hounded ...”

“... at the girls’ school where Lowell was a boy) and the ‘Menninger’ read by his frustrated mother. Other words, less weighted and strategic, call and echo through the collection: ‘yellow’, ‘mustard’, ‘azure’, ‘golf’, ‘anchor’, ‘magnolia’, ‘old-fashioned’, ‘ostrich’, ‘elephant’, ‘hierarchic’ and ...”

“... axes and homemade guns entered the village of Fiyawena looking for a woman called Mifila, the mother of two young children. Six months earlier she and three other women had been accused of using witchcraft to cause a measles epidemic. The suspects had been put on ‘death row’ by their fellow villagers, but were rescued by Enga’s deputy police ...”

“... to be a novel dealing with the Irish War of Independence of 1919-21, which his Irish Protestant mother had childhood memories of, and which he was reading up on in a public library on 53rd Street, ‘scarcely adding to my feeble conception of how the thing should be’. According to his biographer Lavinia Greacen, he was also working on three short ...”

“... of those far away. At one point, a young nun in France describes her joy when Vaillant’s sister, Mother Philomène, reads aloud from her brother’s letters:After the Mother has read us one of those letters … I come and stand in this alcove and look up our little street with its one lamp, and just beyond the turn ...”

“... and allies of Saffy, the teenage daughter in Absolutely Fabulous, looking down her nose at her mother’s immaturity. One can see many of these elements in the recent work of Naomi Wolf, probably the most famous of the new feminists. Now married to a Clinton speech-writer and very much in caring-Democrat mould, Wolf began her career on prime-time TV. She ...”

“... at the Cambridge Poets’ Theatre – O’Hara was acting in John Ashbery’s The Compromise, or Queen of Caribou, and Wieners was stage manager. Wieners remembered a night with O’Hara and Jack Spicer in his ‘dreadful room infested with roaches … while I read my poetry in the humid summer evening of Beacon Hill, the ...”