“... a timber manager, respected in the trade, a man of probity, quiet and undemonstrative. His mother, Anne-Marie, worried constantly, and often took to her bed. Jean-Claude learned to ‘mislead’ her so as not to make her worry even more. Purely emotional distress was considered a caprice in the family, whose motto ran: a Romand tells the truth and shames the ...”

“... Gibbons, which he sometimes wore to answer the door, and a clock that Henry VIII had given to Anne Boleyn. His house was open to visitors if they applied for tickets and Walpole would show them round himself. What it all meant, however, was less easy to see. ‘Horrie’ was described by one of his many detractors as a man who wore ‘mask within ...”

“... in New York was at St Vincent Ferrer, I think – on 66th and Lexington. And we weren’t invited. Anne and I weren’t even told where it was.   As I went in I saw Daphne Hellman with a black hat on. It was such an awful service. Everybody was looking round to see who was there and hobnobbing. I was too. On Mallorca Tony and Barbara both seem to have ...”

“... of the same unspoken narcissism about Marya Hornbacher’s uneven new book, Wasted. Hornbacher was born in California in 1974, a year after the first articles about anorexia, the ‘slimming disease’, began to appear in the mainstream American press. At the age of nine, she became bulimic; at 15, she switched to anorexia, and spent the next several years in ...”

“... his ebullient refusal to be defeated by them, the young Cloughs – Charles Butler, Arthur Hugh, Anne Jemima and George Augustus – learned to value independence and courage. Meanwhile, their mother equipped them with an appetite for learning, together with the scrupulous gravity that characterised evangelical households. In Charleston the family’s ...”

“... truism seemed important was that many of their seniors in Sovietology appeared not to believe it.Born in 1917 to an American father and English mother, public-school and Oxford-educated, Robert Conquest made his first substantial contacts with the Soviet Union through his work in British intelligence during and after the Second World War. His first-hand ...”

“... of educational advantage and career opportunities over the past century and a half. Her mother, Anne Powell, came from a decidedly unintellectual background: Anne’s father, George Powell, was a lieutenant colonel in the Grenadier Guards and briefly a Tory MP, while his wife was the daughter of a brewing family; ...”

“... Thomas​ Hobbes used to tell people that the Spanish Armada was the reason he had been born prematurely. ‘My mother gave birth to twins,’ he said, ‘myself and fear.’ He never shook off the sense of dread. More than half a century later, having fled England for France, he wrote Leviathan, predicated on the view that fear is the chief driver of man ...”

“... notion that anyone can write since all a writer needs is a story) is strictly correct. If you were born, you’re in there with a story. Look what Sterne made of it. It’s true that after the beginning, you need a certain amount of middle, but you don’t have to know the end. Or rather, all stories end the same way, but no narrative, fictional or ...”

“... jostling alongside Philip II of Spain’s daughter Isabella Clara Eugenia and his own English-born first cousin Arbella Stuart.The term ‘regime change’ was coined in the US in the 1920s, but Doran applies it to the dynastic shift in 1603, which ‘despite all the contradictory claims and constitutional uncertainties … was remarkably efficient and ...”

“... Rothschild soon capitulated. And so one of the great credit and property booms of modern times was born, as investment turned to speculation and the stench of corruption spread. There is no proof that Haussmann himself was corrupt (even Jules Ferry’s polemic, ‘Les Comptes fantastiques d’Haussmann’, did not accuse him of graft), although Madame ...”

“... in the GOP vote to roll back Obamacare. And a year later, almost to the day, here is Crudo – born of accident, on holiday, like a dare – and it is already on the Sunday Times bestseller list. ‘Kathy, by which I mean I,’ it begins, ‘was getting married. Kathy, by which I mean I, had just got off a plane from New York.’ The narrator – who has ...”

“... or ruin          this if only this one, is ours.Don’t Call Us Dead brought Smith, who was born in St Paul, Minnesota, mainstream success. But it put them (Smith uses the non-gendered pronoun) in the difficult position of having profited from a book explicitly about Black suffering. ‘These poems are not the poems any poet wished to have so widely ...”

“... us – which often involves passing, if you can call it that, from the family into which we were born to one we hope to shape in our own image.Clare uses her assumed whiteness to marry a man who thinks it’s funny to call her ‘Nig’: ‘Well, you see, it’s like this,’ he tells her long-lost friend over tea at a fancy hotel in New York. ‘When we ...”

“... come let us kiss and part.’ But Jones unsettles the image of the Elizabethan poet as a highly born lover sighing over the cruelty of his highly bored mistress with Skelton’s sprightly ‘My darling dear, my daisy flower’, a deft blend of elevated tone and low purport, where the lover dozes off and the lady slips away to find somebody more easily ...”