“... 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 ...”

“... three index entries under Theresa, Marchioness of Londonderry, refer not to her, but to Frances Anne, while Walter Long appears as Robert. The Chartwell Papers are continually cited for quotations which appear in full in the Randolph Churchill/Martin Gilbert companion volumes, or even in the main volumes themselves. This unhelpful practice has been made ...”

“... it. So one goes back to British Vogue. A witty piece by John Mortimer: a QC of his calibre is a born interviewer, of course, though it took editors years to cotton on to the idea. Among the short stories, I struck old memories of Brendan Behan. Before he was discovered by Joan Littlewood, he used to wander into my office and say he would write me a short ...”

“... to the drama’s ritual, even sacrificial origins. Robert Cowan remarks that tragedy ‘was born under tyranny but flowered under democracy’, though Mitchell Greenberg notes that in the 17th century tragic theatre enjoyed a golden period in an age of political absolutism. It is also worth asking why the decline of tragedy coincided with the waning of ...”

“... to the monkeys. Most of these poems, though, are instruments of a daft sweetness. For a guy born when the bee’s knees were the cat’s pyjamas, Ashbery has a command of the demotic that rivals Lady Gaga’s. It’s not that he notices the latest slang – though I wouldn’t be surprised if ‘epic fail’ turned up in one of his poems – so much as ...”

“... at their height, ache with nostalgia: ‘But were another childhood-world my share,/I would be born a little sister there.’ This was dangerous stuff, especially if it persuaded women to identify contentment with dependence. Eliot, who hadn’t hesitated to sever herself from her brother when he had threatened to curtail her freedom, recognised as much in ...”

“... James Barry arrived in Edinburgh from Ireland in 1809, accompanied by a middle-aged woman, Mary Anne Bulkley, whom he introduced as his aunt. Slight, with reddish blond hair, Barry dressed in a surtout, a sort of overcoat, which he never took off, not even in hot weather. At the University School of Anatomy, where he enrolled on a three-year course, he ...”

“... as a movement in space, from one country to another. In conventional terms, those who were born in the United States are American; those who were not are immigrants. They were born in another country, in another culture. They bring with them from their homeland certain habits and values, shared assumptions and common ...”

“... in Beauvoir’s realisation that her life had been affected in countless ways by her having been born a girl. This massive book was written fast: the first volume appeared in Paris in June 1949, the second five months later. But Beauvoir did not spend all the intervening time on her analysis of women’s condition. In January 1947 she travelled to the United ...”

“... of mud and shit and equipped with instincts lower than those of the pig, or the crab-louse’? Born in 1821 to a wealthy family and growing up in the cautious conservatism of provincial post-Napoleonic France, Flaubert saw only hypocrisy and intellectual dullness all around him. At 17 he was condemning ‘this good civilisation, this agreeable slut who ...”

“... In the summer of​ 1975, the Nigerian-born British novelist Buchi Emecheta went missing for a day. She tucked £10 into her purse and went to Buckingham Palace to watch the Changing of the Guard, then went to look at the glossy black door of 10 Downing Street for the first time. For lunch, she ate what she fancied – salad, cheesecake and not one, not two, but three glasses of bitter lemon – and for once had not cooked any of it ...”

“... of a kind of ‘benign’ piracy, operated by family and/or friends: specifically, on the part of Anne Shakespeare herself, acting through her brother William Hathaway – who would then be, as transmitter of the manuscript, the ‘Mr W.H.’ thanked by the publisher.* But the inclusion of ‘A Lover’s Complaint’ at the end of the 1609 collection has ...”

“... century, ending up in Marseille, where his father worked in the clothing trade. Maxime, who was born in 1915, left school at the age of twelve to work as an errand boy. His parents had backed the Russian Revolution, and in its wake joined the French Communist Party. But their refuge in France was short-lived. They were dispatched to Auschwitz by Hitler’s ...”