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“... firmly in his material and emotional worlds.Buckingham began as ‘nobody special’, born George Villiers in Leicestershire in 1592. He was the second son of Sir George Villiers, a successful sheep farmer, and his second wife, Mary. There was property, but little prospect of a courtly career. Mary, however, was ‘pushy’, and knew she had a ...”

“... disconfirmed, that this new look will help him do better justice to his subject matter.Staël was born in tsarist St Petersburg in 1914, the heir to a family of generals and higher bureaucrats in the Imperial service. His father, General Vladimir de Staël von Holstein, was vice-governor of the Fortress of St Peter and St Paul, where famous liberals had been ...”

“... the Italian she picked up in Somaliland.This is all a version of Hazzard’s own journey. She was born in Sydney in 1931, the younger of Reg and Catherine (‘Kit’) Hazzard’s two daughters. She liked to claim that her parents were Welsh and Scottish but Brigitta Olubas has uncovered hazier beginnings, including illegitimacy and uncertain birth records for ...”

“... lunkish sons, although the father was a dentist – why didn’t the wife get a job?) To the Manor Born offered a replay of old Tory values in an era of new Whiggism calling itself Tory. Penelope Keith’s character rejoiced in both assurance and widowhood. Yet she was merely a charming eccentric at bottom, one of those comic ladies, like Margaret Rutherford ...”

“... Steventon, he demands, ‘resemble those of Marianne Dashwood upon leaving Norland – or those of Anne Elliot upon leaving Kellynch’? To this he gravely replies: ‘We shall never know.’ Reaching Jane Austen’s death for the second time round, he breaks into a snowstorm of questions about whether this memory or that passed through her dying ...”

“... As the heroine of Margaret Drabble’s Garrick Year remarks, ‘it seemed that [Garrick] had been born in Hereford, as had Kemble, Mrs Siddons and Nell Gwynne, though of the four Garrick seemed to me to be the most interesting character.’ In fact, most authorities assign the Kembles’ birthplace to other parts of the country, but they certainly shared a ...”

“... Brixton riots, IRA hunger strikes and trouble in the mines: but young girls’ heads (those not born to it) will be turned by an overdose of petticoats and lace. Only now does Diana appear to have understood that she was merely an actor in a long-running show, whose cast, unlike that of The Mousetrap, never changes. Naturally, waking as she has from a ...”

“... became avid readers of political economy, and some of them, notably the reforming minister Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, also made important contributions to it. They increasingly came to see formal legal privilege as unjustifiable. They also sought to escape from the fiscal double bind through reforms that would generate reliable, taxable economic ...”

“... has to explain to her American readers is ‘whingeing’. Yet he has been in some ways unlucky. Born in 1948, sometimes said to be the most fortunate year of the 20th century, he is one of the baby-boomers who grew up with the National Health Service, free milk and orange juice, student grants and proper occupational pensions, none of which was of any use ...”

“... Bowles, Elise Cowen, Hettie Jones, Lenore Kandel, Joanne Kyger, Denise Levertov, Josephine Miles, Anne Waldman among them. Many of these women, identified by Joyce Johnson in her memoir as Minor Characters, are now major figures in postwar American letters. But as di Prima noted, ‘a lot of potentially great women writers wound up dead or crazy. I think of ...”

“... a prerogative court, is an important exception (hence James Sharpe’s recent The Bewitching of Anne Gunter), and church court records are sometimes quite full. Thus Cressy can tell us the stories of an excommunicated Catholic, buried illegally by night in the chancel of her parish church; of a young man who dressed as a woman to join in the all-female ...”

“... only at the age of 46, his first serious occupation? Craig Brown sets out the essential facts. Born at Grasmere in 1876, he boasted ‘good Westmorland blood, the best in England’. His mother died when he was two days old, his father was a stern, aloof figure. For a single term he played the fop at Oxford, then drifted into the Oscar Wilde circle. He ...”

“... conscientious daily witnessing is always coloured by the hindsight the reader brings to it. Like Anne Frank, Kruk had no knowledge either of his own future or of Hitler’s intentions towards the Jews (information comes erratically as rumour, often wrong), but unlike Frank, Kruk was a political activist, overwhelmingly concerned as a member of the Socialist ...”

“... surgery, so that Jay Gatsby receives the looks first of Robert Redford then Leonardo DiCaprio. Anne Hathaway’s blandly pretty mask is tied with cinematic ribbon over Jane Austen’s blurry features – a criminal defacement however photogenic the impostor. Traffic the other way, taking cinema as the basis for fiction, tends to focus on headline-grabbing ...”

“... book trade of the day. By his own account (a reason, perhaps, for distrusting it), Curll was born in the West Country in 1683, and in an early publication he implicitly claimed descent from Walter Curll, the Royalist Bishop of Winchester before the city fell to Cromwell in 1645. The truth may have been more prosaic, but like much else Curll’s ...”