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“... 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 ...”

“... to wear. To Erdal, her mother’s daughter in some respects,there seemed no way in for those not born to it . . . The vowels . . . springing from a place way down the larynx and travelling up fine, swan-like necks before emerging in beautifully modulated tone patterns. The Scots have short, stunted vowels, cut off in their prime, strangled humanely before ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... works of art in a serious way when he began to die – that is to say, in his forties (he was born in 1892), which is when most of us start thinking up ways of not thinking about mortality. He bought glamorous pieces of French furniture and decorative art, a field in which it is relatively easy to buy reliable advice. He did less well with Old Master ...”

“... and economic migrants has risen steadily: roughly 10 per cent of the current population was born elsewhere. Ireland can now lay claim to ethnic diversity, along with some less attractive features of rampant capitalism, including a widening gap between rich and poor. And the rhetoric has changed too. For much of Ireland’s post-independence history ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in 1939, which evokes in absorbing detail the early life of a child of well-to-do parents, ‘born into a very communicative, literate, letter-writing, visiting, articulate late-19th-century world’. Most of the time, Woolf maintains, we exist enveloped in a kind of ‘nondescript cotton wool’. ‘One walks, eats, sees things, deals with what has to be ...”

“... in the education of the Duke of Norfolk, grandfather of Henry VIII’s most unfortunate wives, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, to whom he may have passed on impeccable nasal hygiene. The text does not, alas, teach how to avoid being beheaded by a king.It wasn’t until 1744 that John Newbery published what is generally thought to be the first ...”

“... most illuminating. Others who keep them are too cautious, i.e. Harold Nicolson.’Both men were born far from Westminster: Nicolson in 1886 in Tehran, where his father was a diplomat; Channon in Chicago in 1897. For years he lied about his age, until humiliation came in 1938: ‘The Sunday Express published this morning the fact that I am really 41 instead ...”