“... 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 ...”

“... Marianne Moore​ was born in her mother’s childhood bedroom; grown up, she lived with her mother – most often shared her bed – until her mother died. She was then 59 and her mother 85; she lived another 25 years and died in 1972 a happy spinster, a famous poet and a grande dame.Mary Warner Moore – the mother in question – had scarcely had a mother, which must be to the point ...”

“... reinforces this quality, seeming to echo the ‘lovely’ but ‘unyielding’ sentences that Anne Enright describes in the volume’s introduction. It’s difficult to look at Brennan here and not think of the words she puts in a missionary’s mouth in ‘Stories of Africa’: ‘You could say that an exile was a person who knew of a country that made ...”

“... recurring themes in Miranda Seymour’s deft and compelling account of the whole horrible saga. Anne Isabella, as she was christened, was the late and much loved only child of ageing parents who doted on her. Sir Ralph and Lady Milbanke were justified in admiring their daughter’s intelligence and high spirits, if less sensible in giving in to them. In due ...”

“... schematic episodes, which could be summarised and rephrased as follows. 1. Childhood. Godard was born in Switzerland in 1930. His father was a successful doctor who ran a private clinic in Nyon, his mother a member of a rich banking family, the founders of the Banque de Paris et des Pays Bas. Godard remembers his childhood as an idyllic time, especially the ...”

“... Oxford, Brighton and Glasgow in the rankings of pro-EU vote share. But its Conservative MP, Anne Main, is strongly pro-Brexit, and I was curious to see which way people are likely to jump come the next, surely imminent election.By chance, in between visits to St Albans, business took me to other Remainian strongholds. After Bath, Edinburgh and St Albans ...”

“... election, Lloyd Warner was burned alive before a cheering crowd of ten thousand in Princess Anne, Maryland, after an attempt to hang him had failed. Nothing so ghastly was permitted on the streets of Hitler’s new Reich. Still, this didn’t stop the Nazis romanticising the South and indulging in soft-soap fantasies about its martial culture. The ...”

“... and Ireland. John McGahern, Edna O’Brien, Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams: they were all born between the end of the First World War and the early 1930s, and published their stories of class alienation in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It’s a bit late, too, for the middle-class unmarried motherhood plot: Lynne Reid Banks, The L-Shaped Room ...”

“... and the following paragraph. For some three hundred years after the mid-15th century, a new art born in Italy swept Europe, accompanying the greater visual arts. Sculptors, painters and then printers started to imitate Roman stonecutters, ‘never surpassed for the beauty of their lettering’. Simple paragraphing gave way to a new and distinctive ...”

“... literary, as well as a great bibliographical, curiosity. Its author, Count Jan Potocki, who was born in 1761, belonged to one of the small handful of landowning families – the Potockis, Radziwills, Branickis, Czartoryskis and Sapiehas – who for centuries ran Poland. Frequently intermarrying, they cornered all the hereditary offices of state and ...”

“... behave as women, paints a picture of their role very similar to that in the writings of Jane and Anne Taylor, Congregationalist in faith. Young girls, Charlotte Yonge thought, should not be able to reserve any time for their own private occupations, except that on Sunday afternoons they should be able to prepare for the Sunday school which they would hold ...”

“... prefigures modern demons of another kind. The Golden Legend was approved literature for well-born, literate women, when most other narrative works in the vernacular – romances, for example – were frowned on and banned. Margaret King, navigating the narrows the female sex had to ply, mentions copies of The Golden Legend, in English and French, being ...”

“... a wizard, but not a gentle or benign one. He wasn’t raised that way. Stephen Joshua Sondheim was born in New York City in 1930 to parents of German Jewish descent. His father was a dress manufacturer and his mother a designer and they lived in the San Remo apartment building on Central Park West. When Stephen was ten, his father left the family and Stephen ...”

“... Holy Roman Emperor and head of the house of Habsburg, returned to the Low Countries, where he was born: there, he began the long, slow process by which he abdicated in favour of his son Philip and brother Ferdinand. It was abundantly clear why such a transfer of power was necessary. It was a cold winter and Charles, white-haired, with shrunken gums exposing ...”