“... 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 ...”

“... the meantime, not least a painful truth about his wife, Evie, and Rob. Artie isn’t reprieved and born again. He doesn’t become ‘good’ either, even if Evie, glimpsed in widowhood, thinks of him as ‘an absolute saint’. Instead, he’s forced into ‘finally becoming a grown-up’, which means recognising how little he has understood about ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... US in 1942.Shiber had operated as part of a duo with her friend Kate Bonnefous. Kate Robins was born in London in 1886; she moved to Paris just after the First World War, where she met and married Henri Bonnefous. They separated in the late 1930s, but remained on good terms. Henri would play a crucial role in his former wife’s Resistance network: through ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... drive to self-immolation. Charlotte’s Villette is full of such erotic perversities. Apart from Anne Brontë’s writings, there is nothing moderate or middle of the road about these extremist fictions. They do not fit easily with the mainstream English novel from Austen and Thackeray to George Eliot and Henry James. The Brontës are a long way from the ...”