“... She was born round the corner in an attic. Balancing chemistry textbooks on her feet, her father pushed the ivory five-foot pram down the middle. ‘He thought you were immortal’ says her mother. Later she daggered sticks along immaculate black railings. Today it is a psalm with each brass doorbell, every blue-rinsed concierge, daily bland against the rush of last hopes ...”

“... She studied art history at Columbia (and is therefore ‘cultured’, according to Reva). She was born into privilege and now lives on an inheritance from her parents. She used to work at a Chelsea gallery, where she would take naps in a storage cupboard during her lunch hour, until she was fired and started sleeping full-time. But beauty and money won’t ...”

“... to wonder about their maker. Does it help to know that she was the eldest of five children born to bourgeois parents in Gotha, Thuringia, or to learn that she left school at 15 because her insurance agent father and amateur painter mother decided she was needed at home? Perhaps not, until one discovers that it was only in 1912, at the age of 21, that ...”

“... wafted in from a story by Poe. If there is something unsettling in the way Kantor, who was born in Minsk in 1896, deals with the distant past of his adopted country, his picture is among those in the show that engage with, and manage to contest, the nation’s founding myths. Consider the contrast between Kantor’s picture and the nearby work by Doris ...”

“... at the heart’ of this biography of Queen Mary. What steaming titbit can her fellow American, Anne Edwards, biographer of film stars, have turned up at this late hour? Can it really be that rather overworked rumour that identifies Prince Eddy, the Queen’s first fiancé, as Jack the Ripper? Indeed it can. James Pope-Hennessy did not find room to discuss ...”

“... its neighbour, it realises a quite different notion of sculpture: Young Man ironed flat.Ray was born in Chicago in 1953 and moved to California in 1981. His process is singular; he uses both amateur and professional models, often working with the aid of computer-driven machines, and usually produces at life size or larger. The results seem both traditional ...”

“... National Museum of Wales in Cardiff (until 1 September) is a tribute to his time in the region. Born in Surrey in 1945, he moved to the once flourishing slate-mining town of Blaenau Ffestiniog in 1967, the year he left Kingston School of Art. By then, work at the local mines and mills had all but collapsed. Oakeley, the largest underground slate mine in the ...”

“... I had moved with it, or so it seemed at the time. Three years later I was suddenly, ecstatically Born Again (hallelujah!), because lapsing was not a matter of indifference, after all, but of crisis. No one talks about how much fun it is to be a fundamentalist. The word has changed, of course: for any rational person, ‘fundamentalist’ now means ...”

“... the relative insignificance of gender as a defining category in this period. Storch was born in 1681 in a village of six hundred inhabitants where both his father and grandfather had practised as tailors, local healers and dealers in herbs and medicines. Unlike them, he studied medicine at the University of Jena, where he undertook the dissection of ...”

“... Hepburn, making this biography of her as a film star more than readable. She was, as it were, born with a very definite and accepted self, the inherited and environmentally-conditioned personality of a ‘great lady’ on the eastern seaboard of America, destined to follow her mother in being a gracious hostess, golfer, lady bountiful, social ...”

“... Anne Lister was undoubtedly one of the most unorthodox women of the early 19th century. She was an active and entirely unashamed lesbian, a scholar, a dauntless traveller and a resourceful businesswoman. As an example of what female tenacity could achieve in the pre-Victorian period, she might be seen as a fortifying ideal ...”

“... amazed that ‘bravery’ is one of the feelings she has already experienced, that she should be born so intrepid and easily affronted – that she should be born so much herself. She is also, at this early stage, almost gender free. This is useful. The statistics on how often mothers choose not to breastfeed girl babies ...”

“... readerly qualities are all to the good, given that the conceptualist generation (the majority were born in the 1930s and 1940s) shared a preference for working with words, if in an aggressively non-literary way. These were artists more at home at a desk than an easel, more likely to wield a camera than a paintbrush. Most preferred data to drawing, were ...”

“... Parker Bowles like?’ He could do worse than refer the curious to Rebecca Tyrrel’s book. Born on 17 July 1947 (she is 16 months older than Prince Charles), Camilla is the daughter of an army major, Bruce Shand, and a society hostess, the Honourable Rosalind Shand (née Cubitt). Her paternal grandfather, P. Morton Shand, was an ‘insatiable ...”

“... quoted in the Irish Times, from the Dublin photographer Bill Doyle who, like my father, was born in 1925.The idea that the population of Ireland occupies one giant bed is a happy one, made nicer, in Ulysses, by the fact that Mulligan is referring to the wide sea. This is such an arbitrary and accurate thing to put in a book. It is a nugget which ...”