“... surgeon, a Chartist, a vegetarian, a philoprogenetive advocate of free love, who called his child, born in his late years, Jesu Grist (sic). When the baby died, he tried to burn him on a pyre, according to ancient Celtic custom (he claimed). He tried again, when another of his many children died. After each attempt, he was charged, but unexpectedly, he was in ...”

“... transformed them into a composite portrait of working life in early modern England. People were born ‘to lyve in labour and pain, and the most parte of their tyme with the swete of ther face’, Edmund Dudley wrote in The Tree of Commonwealth in 1509. But what a thing to see the sweat glistening on the brow. This project must have been an absurdly ...”

“... were tending toward social chaos’. The antinomian heresy (1636-8), provoked by the East Anglians Anne Hutchinson and John Wheelwright, and supported by at least nine East Anglian merchants, not only tore apart the town’s public decorum but threatened the structure of sexual relations. The most recent scholarly history of Springfield, Massachusetts, settled ...”

“... States last night.’ As Trump dispatched his ‘shiny and new’ missiles to Syria a year later, Anne-Marie Slaughter, a former Obama apparatchik and president of the New America Foundation, tweeted that it was the ‘right thing’ to do. ‘It will not stop the war nor save the Syrian people from many other horrors,’ Slaughter conceded, and ‘it is ...”

“... immortalised the people’s friend as a martyr for the republic and the revolution.Marat was born in Boudry, a small town in the principality of Neuchâtel, in 1743. His father was a defrocked priest from Sardinia who had fled to Geneva, converted to Calvinism and married into a family of Huguenot wig-makers. According to his own recollection, as a child ...”

“... disease-ridden. In 1800, life expectancy at birth for a man was forty. Schubert made it to 31. Born in 1797, on the kitchen floor of a one-room apartment, he was the thirteenth child of fifteen, ten of whom died in infancy. His mother died when he was fifteen. His father – a schoolmaster, modestly successful, upright, thrifty, living well a life of which ...”

“... The house is open for holiday rentals.The writer better known as Lewis Grassic Gibbon was born James Leslie Mitchell in 1901, the third son of a tenant farmer couple living on a rented smallholding near Auchterless, a little north and inland of Aberdeen. The land was bad and it was impossible to make it pay, so in 1908 the family moved south to ...”

“... the rapid juxtaposition of high and low, the flight of fancy and the thump to earth. Here is Lady Anne Pantry, the bishop’s wife, musing on Ashringford Cathedral:And the cathedral was very perfect indeed. How admirable, through the just sufficient drapery of the trees, were the great glazed windows that flashed like black diamonds in the sun. The ...”

“... in SF has gained Dick’s posthumous eminence. But why him? Dick manifestly led a troubled life. Born in 1928, a twin whose sister died soon after birth, he spent his childhood in relative poverty with his divorced mother. The dead sister – like almost everything else in Dick’s early life – has fictional analogues: in Dr Bloodmoney (1965), we meet a ...”

“... Victoria for his exploits and awarded the Iron Crown of Austria (second class), the orders of St Anne of Russia and of the Red Eagle of Prussia, as well as being a hereditary pasha of the Turkish Empire. These honours were added to those he’d already received, the Redeemer of Greece, the cross of the Légion d’honneur – he is wearing several of them in ...”

“... of sociology, and drama favours a stage without too much human clutter. Veronica, the narrator of Anne Enright’s The Gathering, somewhere in the middle of a tribe of 12 (seventh from the top, fifth from the bottom), suggests there’s a certain uniformity about the large family: ‘There is always a drunk. There is always someone who has been interfered ...”

“... of object no longer exists locally, would that not be just as good a reason for a restitution?’ Anne Wetsi Mpoma, a Congolese gallerist based in Brussels, argues that provenance may even be an obstacle to restitution. It’s easy to imagine an artefact stranded in limbo as scholars rummage in the archive hoping to discover how it made its way to Belgium 150 ...”

“... the most affecting sentence in this book is the last: ‘In the morning, work.’Francis Bacon was born in Dublin in 1909. His father, who had been in the army and dealt in horses, was irascible. He took a dim view of his second son. ‘Like many fathers of the time, the Major tried to punish, shame and force the weakness out of his sickly second ...”

“... Fielding was born in 1707 into a family in straitened circumstances but of aristocratic connections. A family myth, based on forged papers, claimed descent from the Hapsburgs. The combination of financial embarrassment and gentlemanly caste is emblematic of the whole atmosphere of his life, and is variously reflected in his writings ...”

“... Fauci and Deborah Birx, to tiptoe around his volcanic ego. The blithe inaction and bumbling born of ideological vanity have resulted in tens of thousands of avoidable deaths in both countries, with ethnic minorities heavily overrepresented. Meanwhile, rage against white supremacism is exploding on American streets. Whatever the fate of these ...”