“... 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 ...”

“... me right now. I only stole the books that baffled me, the ones I couldn’t seem to solve. She was born Lula Carson Smith in Columbus, Georgia in 1917. Her father, Lamar Smith, was a jeweller who was forever tinkering with watches. Her mother, Marguerite, a more vivacious personality, had intended to name her baby Enrico Caruso and bragged to visitors that ...”

“... her mother and sisters adrift on a bed: the remaining family lovingly nestled. Her son Frank was born on 10 December 1984. She took three weeks off in Cambridge after the birth at the Portland Hospital (which Freud paid for) before leaving the baby with her mother and returning to London. In After Watteau she sat with Bella, because of having to rest her ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... sister, and so their children became part of this ménage. Thomas, his eldest son, was born around the same time as Henry Bolingbroke, Gaunt’s son by Blanche, who would seize the throne as Henry IV in 1399. It was Gaunt’s lavish patronage that enabled Thomas to make a brilliant marriage and become a substantial landholder. Alice, Thomas’s ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... set of political principles, and followed, even in 1931, what he felt was ‘the path of duty’.Born in 1866 in Lossiemouth, a small fishing village in the north-east of Scotland, to the unmarried Anne Ramsay, who worked as a maid, MacDonald was a pupil-teacher at the local parish school before departing for England at ...”

“... this white rose with Plantagenet.It was another two hundred years before Walter Scott’s novel Anne of Geierstein, published in 1829, brought the idea of the ‘wars of the White and Red Roses’ into common usage. Since then it has become synonymous with the political turmoil which, between 1455 and 1485, saw four English kings deposed (one of them ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... has defects both of taste and of substance, but it is on balance a valuable achievement. Hart was born in 1907 to a well-off Jewish family with a clothing business in Harrogate, and he acquired a strong sense of himself as Jewish without acquiring the religion. At Oxford he read Greats and got a brilliant first, but was unsuccessful in his two attempts at the ...”