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“... 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 ...”

“... extant letters … and there is certainly enough material for a further volume.’ MacNeice was born in Belfast, ‘between the mountain and the gantries’, in 1907. The next year his father, a Church of Ireland minister and Home Ruler who refused to sign the Ulster Covenant, was given the parish of St Nicholas in Carrickfergus, where he stayed until ...”

“... himself and the Princess. They divided his friends into those who ‘like Dr Johnson meeting Queen Anne would bow so low they could see back between their legs’ and those who would ‘say aggressively: “I’m not going to call you Ma’am, you know.” Such encounters typically attract Quentin’s feline eye and claws, and there is plenty of room for ...”

“... the face of both camps’, and ‘taken oppima spolia from him’. He had married, and held a new-born daughter in his arms, and buried her six months later: This grave partakes the fleshly birth, Which cover lightly, gentle earth. His actual literary apprenticeship (like Shakespeare’s probably) took the form of acting in the provinces. Dekker liked to ...”

“... know who is in the Musgroves’ dining-room in Bath, and where in the room they are standing, when Anne Elliot receives Captain Wentworth’s letter, and if you have not understood why she cannot ‘rush to her closet with it as one of Richardson’s heroines would have done’, you cannot understand the intolerable tension she feels. Northanger Abbey ...”

“... which constantly tugs towards a greater abstraction, a separation of thought from thing. ‘We are born in houses we did not make,’ says Paz, forcing Tomlinson back in the next poem to insist afresh on primary solidities of belonging: house, you began in milk, in warmth, in eating: words must re-tongue your first solidities and thought keep fresh your ...”