“... 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 ...”

“... for the rest of his life. When he was four, his father defaulted on the stock exchange and his mother left Lear to the care of his eldest sister, Ann. His sense of rejection began early, and he dated the start of his prolonged periods of depression (‘the morbids’) to the age of six. Then, just before his tenth birthday, his cousin Frederick Harding ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... more practising Catholics than practising Anglicans in Britain, more Moslems than Methodists. The Mother of Parliaments, too, has lost some of her prestige and much of her power, and seems to many now to be inequitably elected. Finally and transparently, success has become elusive. The Empire has gone. There are unlikely to be any more attractive and ...”

“... tending at times to bombast. This is ‘To the One of Fictive Music’, from Harmonium:Sister and mother and diviner love,And of the sisterhood of the living deadMost near, most clear, and of the clearest bloom,And of the fragrant mothers the most dearAnd queen, and of diviner love the ...”

“... all his early reading was in that language. His social background was much less traditional. His mother, known in Petersburg as ‘the beautiful Creole’, was the granddaughter of a black slave, traditionally thought to have been a captured Ethiopian, though Binyon, with customary care, thinks Cameroon the likelier origin. He was a gift for Peter the ...”

“... known as ‘Plum’ after his father the cricketer, came back at long last from the war, my mother was already in London. She had arrived a few months before from Bari, her home town in southern Italy, flying in on one of the first passenger flights to land in the newly demilitarised airport at Heathrow, and making her own way with her small belongings ...”

“... village of Mortlake, near London, in early March 1582. Dee, then in his mid-fifties, was the Queen’s chief consultant on all matters occult. He was renowned as a mathematician, physician, astrologer, geographer and, in the popular parlance, a ‘conjuror’. His visitor was, at this point, an altogether more shadowy ...”