“... 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 ...”

“... he left Scotland. ‘There is no evidence,’ James Buchan writes, ‘he ever returned.’ Law was born in 1671, the son of William Law, a master goldsmith who, like other goldsmiths of his time, drifted from metallurgy into finance, becoming a lender to clients. Success in this sphere enabled the purchase of an estate at Lauriston in 1683. His family ...”

“... her to articulate the child’s view of life so well. The daughter of wealthy Unitarians, she was born in London in 1866. Her father, who was a lawyer, inherited a share of the Potter family fortune, which came from a calico works at Dinting Vale in Derbyshire. As Nonconformists still rather too close to their roots in trade, the Potters were awkwardly placed ...”

“... with Seelig, he notes, ruefully, the points that might have yielded success but didn’t. He was born in the town of Biel, ‘a very very small metropolis’ on the border between the German and French-speaking areas of Switzerland, the son of a struggling bookbinder and a woman who suffered from mental illness. He left school at 14 to work as a bank ...”

“... of the last Ice Age. Four years later she was pregnant and the first of her two daughters was born. As soon as the baby appeared it was obvious she had inherited her father’s flame-red hair. By the time she was a year old it was also obvious that she had inherited Tara’s independent streak. She refused to listen to any instructions and was always ...”

“... marriage. Howard had consulted Forman about the fulfilment of her passion, and her confidante Mrs Anne Turner, who was supposed to have got hold of the poison, had been very intimate with Forman, and not, it seems, for haleking purposes. Turner was executed, and her villainy blamed on the diabolic arts of Forman, who was by then dead; Frances Howard got off ...”

“... unimpressed by an unnaturally informative cloth label pasted to the back, which read: ‘Shakspere/Born April 23 = 1564/Died April 23 – 1616/Aged 52/This Likeness taken 1603/Age at that time 39 ys.’ Spielmann doesn’t say so, but it’s hard not to suspect that this label was written to overcompensate for that missing two-inch strip, which if it had given ...”

“... I had been brought back unconsulted and against my wishes to the house my father had been born in, to be saved from a life of poverty and provincialism, bare feet, suet puddings, unsanitary school slates, perhaps even from the inverted r’s of my mother’s family. With this surprising set of grandparents, until a few weeks ago no more than names, a ...”

“... please Kafka, or at any rate confirm his worst fears: to be sentenced to death before one is even born would be for him a kind of apotheosis. 25 March, Yorkshire. Drive over into Wensleydale for the view of a sale at Tennant’s. Leyburn turns out to be a High Recognition Area, and as I walk past the church two middle-aged WI-type ladies come out and their ...”

“... question: how on earth did Madge manage to get her shorts on over the breeches? Madge was born in 1879; Monty, the black sheep of the family, an archetypal remittance man, in 1880; and Agatha, somewhat of an afterthought, in 1890. Madge was sent to boarding-school in Brighton, Monty to Harrow, but Agatha had no formal education until she went to ...”

“... biographers without anyone being left much the wiser about who she really was or even when she was born – sometime around 1835 seems likely. It is certain that she was carried bareback (in more senses than one) into American theatrical history three months after Abraham Lincoln became President, when she travestied the title role in Mazeppa, or The Wild ...”

“... that pervades the Palace.From the Firm’s most entitled familiars down to its ‘high-born’ nabobs and sycophants in waiting, all the way down indeed to its ill-paid secretaries and resentful menials: everyone seems willing to ‘reveal’ the family secrets to Brown. Bullying, cruel sackings, evictions from grace and favour houses, cousins ...”

“... a coarse and cruel tyrant, but the deliverer of his people and the founder of the modern state. Anne Boleyn wasn’t the innocent victim of a monster’s caprice, but a nymphomaniac and serial adulteress who was properly tried and legally executed. Thomas More, the genial philosopher, was not a saint but a sadistic bigot. The real Mary Tudor wasn’t the ...”

“... of architectural and social history. Let one epiphany sum up his attitude to the former: I was born in the heavily bombed port of Southampton in the early 1980s and the city’s postwar modernist buildings would have been finished at least a decade earlier. I can recall looking at its mainly 1960s skyline from the walkway of a bricky pomo Asda, thinking ...”