“... 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 ...”

“... without the idea of his childhood landscape as release. Out of that pulsation, Ford argues, was born ‘the concept of Wessex’: the rural scene, eternal but eternally threatened by overweening urbanism, the pastoral redoubt far from the madding crowd, where Hardy could ‘know some liberty’, as he puts it in his poem ‘Wessex Heights’. Ford reminds ...”

“... century, Horace Walpole pored over a miniature by Isaac Oliver – Hilliard’s brilliant French-born pupil – and found that ‘the largest magnifying glass only calls out new beauties.’The​ 400th anniversary of Hilliard’s death this year has been marked by the publication of Elizabeth Goldring’s impeccably researched new biography, and by an ...”

“... confession, a label often used to describe the work of Plath and her contemporary Anne Sexton) lead us, not just into the inner recesses of the poet’s thought, but through the veils, behind the closed doors of her past? Do we enter the room, see the knife slit the finger, catch the raised voices, watch the vase shatter, hear the baby ...”

“... After one minute, Rupert became aware, however, that the body of one of his fellow actors, Anne Lambton, was shaking like a spin-dryer next to me . . . Soon I was shaking, too . . . Tears were streaming down our faces but we were just about under control when a lady in the audience said: ‘Ahh, those two must have been really fond of him.’ That ...”

“... Gothic scenario of scandals and disasters out of their family history. Fanny’s eldest sister was born before her parents’ marriage; her younger brother Charles was sent down from Cambridge for stealing library books; her stepmother was violent and tyrannical; her half-brother Richard was shipped off to India for some unnamed crime; her brother-in-law ...”

“... most distinguished military writers, Ze’ev Schiff and Ehud Ya’ari, have declared: ‘Born of the ambition of one wilful, reckless man, Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon was anchored in delusion, propelled by deceit, and bound to end in calamity.’ The deceit is sustained throughout this book by manipulation of figures and misrepresentation of ...”

“... relic of times past, and in 1947 he contracted his last and apparently happiest marriage – to Anne Sullivan, a young, beautiful, spirited Irish Canadian almost as rich as he. Ridley’s protective attitude toward his subject is so undisguised as to be endearing. He paints him as a model of the aristocratic ideal, and explains away or skims over the rough ...”

“... to ours except that Queen Elizabeth has borne five children, the extra one being the second-born Prince Richard, Duke of Sussex. Now that he has grown up, who of his three differently-unsuitable ladies will Richard marry? The aristocrat with the mad mother, the American who takes drugs or the black one? Unlike the Prince of Wales, Richard is not ...”