“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... throughout much of London. Indeed, it was in this immediate context that the Survey of London was born. In 1894, C.R. Ashbee, a young East End architect, with a passionate interest in the Arts and Crafts Movement, was so outraged by the demolition of the Old Palace at Bromley-le-Bow that he set up a Committee for the Survey of London Monuments, which planned ...”

“... the son of a Jewish wartime profiteer who may have been part of collaborationist networks, was born in 1945, and has written to excavate the suppressed memories of the war, especially his father’s. His novels turn on the trauma of not knowing his own past, of being the child of a war he never experienced directly. Melville, who was ...”

“... it, and tonight, returning from the opera, we are mortified to find we are too late for supper. Anne Vaughan, our organiser, braves the kitchen and eventually a waitress takes pity on us and gives us some bread and ham and a bit of dog-eared salad which we take upstairs in plastic bags. ‘You must be very hungry,’ says a man in the lift. ‘What country ...”

“... In 1874 John Yeats took his family away from the Pollexfens to London. A sixth child, Jane, was born the following year, on Jack’s fourth birthday, but died within months. Five years later, when money was very short, Jack was sent to Sligo, to be brought up by his grandparents. When Susan Yeats died on 3 January 1900, her daughters were in their ...”