“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”