“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Against Eric Williams’s insistence in Capitalism and Slavery (1944) that ‘slavery was not born of racism: rather, racism was the consequence of slavery,’ Jordan argued that prejudice had shaped English interactions with Africans from the outset. The English, he wrote, had been ‘startled’ and ‘puzzled’ by the dark skin of sub-Saharan ...”

“... 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 ...”