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“... 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 ...”

“... Born,​ out of wedlock, in Rome in 1880 to a high-spirited, convent-educated but unconventional young aristocrat of Russian, Polish and Italian descent, the poet Apollinaire was given no fewer than five prénoms by his mother: his full name, in its French version, was Guillaume-Albert-Wladimir-Alexandre-Apollinaire de Kostrowitzky ...”

“... Lachmann, aka ‘La Païva’, probably the most financially successful courtesan of the century. Born to Polish parents in a Moscow ghetto, she rose to become the wife of a Portuguese marquis and then of a Prussian count who financed her building of a mansion on the Champs-Elysées. The playwright François Ponsard, adapting a line from Phèdre, said of her ...”

“... the loose chronology of Downton it is supposed to be about 1920 and she is going on eighty. Nobody born in 1840, in any class, would have heard the word before they reached middle age. In 1879 a correspondent to Notes and Queries wondered if it was a dialect term. In Staffordshire, he explained, ‘if a person leaves home … on the Saturday afternoon to spend ...”

“... only remarkable thing about the Galvins seemed to be how many of them there were: twelve children born to Don and Mimi between 1945 and 1965. Don worked in public relations for the military, specialising in the missile detection radar that promised North Americans they’d have a good fifteen minutes of warning before any nuclear attack. He took sick leave ...”

“... theoretician of traditional societies,’ he conceded, ‘but he was a prophet of the past; he was born too late in a world too new.’Yet the spectre of Malthus continued to haunt industrial modernity. No sooner had the Great Exhibition of 1851 encouraged Victorians to embrace material gratification without guilt than William Stanley Jevons began to warn of ...”