“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... families played an outsize role in high finance? The antisemitism of the late 19th century was born out of economic and social instability. It had little to do with Jews, and even less with the tenets of Judaism. My own great-great-great-great grandfather Simon Lévy, who came from Lorraine and served as rabbi of Bordeaux from 1864 to 1886, missed the ...”

“... years remains scant, partly because Schuyler didn’t want to go into the details. He was born in Chicago in 1923 to parents from Midwestern farming families. ‘As far as I’m concerned,’ he said of his father, ‘he was an enchantingly wonderful man. Unfortunately he was a compulsive gambler, which my mother found rather hard to take.’ They ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... journey, before her prize of being proposed to by the clever, funny, entertaining, well-born and even well-off Henry Tilney, in himself the strongest contrast to Brandon and Ferrars. And yet it is a mark of his moral integrity that he proposes to Catherine (we are told clearly) out of kindness and gratitude, and remorse at his father’s ...”

“... that excited everyone around him. Bellow was the first writer of my generation – we had been born ten days apart – who talked of Lawrence and Joyce, Hemingway and Fitzgerald, not as books in the library but as fellow operators in the same business. As I walked him across Brooklyn Bridge and around my favourite streets in Brooklyn Heights, he looked my ...”

“... of commitment to a radical equality, in ways that anticipate the feminisms of Monique Wittig and Anne Garréta.* In this vein, I would add that Sarraute’s insistence on the impersonal and anonymous aspects of language and subjectivity strikes me as consonant with Barthes’s ideas about a politics of style, an egalitarian utopia of the neutral. But even ...”

“... supposed to have invented the phrase ‘male bonding’) is ousted from the second edition, as is Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot.One scoreline in the Yale Book is the most revealing of all: Plato 11, Mark Twain 154. The equivalent figures in the 2014 Oxford Dictionary are Plato 18, Twain 34. Twain spoke and wrote to be quoted, as did epigones of his such as ...”

“... who was known for most of his life as Jim, lived through nearly the whole of the 20th century. Born in 1895, he died in 1990, having, as his modest epitaph in St Peter’s church in Cambridge puts it, ‘created Kettle’s Yard and helped to preserve this church’. Kettle’s Yard, the house and gallery that still holds Ede’s collection of 20th-century ...”

“... symbolic figure, perhaps intended to displace a more commonly perceived symbolic figure – Anne Frank, let us say.’ That’s a pretty loaded insinuation. As late as 2005, Ozick, speaking at Harvard, was still condemning Styron’s decision to position a non-Jewish protagonist at the narrative centre, thereby diluting, obscuring and ultimately ...”

“... are problems with all this. In a vigorous essay called ‘Inside and Outside History’, the poet Anne Stevenson challenged Boland’s claim that she lacks female precursors, and suggested that her sense of isolation is encouraging feminist correctness at the expense of ‘fire or flair’. Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill knocked holes in Stevenson’s account of Gaelic ...”