“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”