“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... The ‘philosophy of desire’ was born in 1969, Serge Gainsbourg’s année érotique, when the radical psychoanalyst Félix Guattari met the philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Today, it’s hard to imagine them not knowing each other, and easy to forget how unlikely their partnership was. François Dosse begins his biography of the two men with their first encounter, a year after the ‘events’ of 1968, which, more than anything, inspired their collaboration ...”

“... the anxious conformities of the Cape Town Jewish community into which she and other others were born. Their clannishness only intensified by apartheid, the elders of the tribe devoted themselves to perpetuating the group through marriage and child-rearing, ritualistically affirming their collective identity with lavish bar mitzvahs and weddings. ‘You ...”

“... of the modern poet: an attempt to transform childhood unhappiness into literary success. He was born in Garrettsville, Ohio in 1899 to parents who were, as the editors of the letters put it, ‘prosperous, ambitious and ill-matched’. The family moved to Cleveland, as his father’s business became increasingly successful, and the couple divorced when ...”

“... Longley has described himself as ‘a mutant Irishman’ on the grounds that, though he was born and brought up in Belfast, his parents were both English. He therefore grew up (as I did) in a puzzling Irish/British city which lacked a ‘familial hinterland’. This partly explains the double-minded uncertainties of While I, hands in my ...”

“... and there are many more.’ It’s these other tones which are missing in The Ice-Pilot Speaks. Anne Stevenson compares Stainer to Emily Dickinson, but she reminds me more of Edith Sitwell, particularly the Sitwell of Façade, not in terms of rhythm (which Sitwell used quite skilfully and Stainer hardly uses at all) but in terms of emotional range and ...”

“... affluent working class’. Between Aldbury, the picturesque but poor village where Landemare was born in 1882, the local market town of Tring and the backwater of Aston Clinton where she grew up, families like the Youngs were held in the orbit of the local landowners, who included the Flowers, the Harcourts (for whom her grandfather was a ...”