“... 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 ...”

“... was ‘Ty’ because he looked like Tyrone Power, his father was only eighteen when Alfredo was born; his mother was in her early twenties. She made ends meet with factory jobs and other low-paid work, and going to the cinema with her son was one of her few pleasures. When she could afford it, she took him to see Broadway plays. ‘She didn’t know that ...”

“... year Denis Donoghue, in a new edition of his Connoisseurs of Chaos, wrote: Elizabeth Bishop was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, February 8, 1911. Her father died when she was eight months old. Her mother, mentally ill, spent long periods in hospital: she was taken, when Elizabeth was five, to a mental hospital in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. Elizabeth never ...”

“... has the opportunity to set this right, to begin at the beginning.Elizabeth Bruce Hardwick was born in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1916, the eighth of eleven children. Her siblings became teachers, post-office clerks, beauticians, farmers, but Hardwick had larger aspirations. ‘How can you be from here and think like you do?’ a fellow Southerner asked. The ...”

“... never seen.3 May. A distressing call today from Dr C., the oncologist who looked after my friend Anne during her last illness. He talks about hospital services being deliberately run down and the difficulties of ward care due to shortage of staff but it’s only gradually I realise that what he wants is for me to try and write a play about it. I explain what ...”

“... not an emotion. You can’t use emotions. There’s nothing you can do with them. Paul Bowles was born in Long Island in 1910. His father, whom he seemed to despise, was a dentist. He studied briefly at the University of Virginia. He began as a poet and composer, coming under the influence of both Gertrude Stein and Aaron Copland. In 1931, with Copland, he ...”

“... John Macleod, who was off fishing in Scotland during the crucial experiments, did.) Or penicillin. Anne Miller, the first patient to be saved by the antibiotic, died on 27 May this year at the age of 90. Her hospital chart from 1942, showing the dramatic break in her life-threatening fever, is preserved in the Smithsonian. Insofar as medicine heals, it started ...”

“... that she be categorised as intersex was dismissed: medical evidence attested that she was born with male gonads, chromosomes and genitalia. Although there had been minimal development at puberty, no facial hair, some breast formation, and what Ashley referred to as a ‘virginal penis’ because of its diminutive size, the judge also ruled out these ...”

“... pursue Like Rats that ravyn down their proper Bane, A thirsty evill, and when we drinke, we die. Anne Barton has remarked, slightly bitterly, that ‘much of the action takes place in a prison’: and certainly the shadow of bars is all a workable set really requires. The prison is a real place, city-like, full of all the ‘great doers of our trade’ in ...”

“... was abolished while it was still waiting to be read it is unmarked. More thrilling by far is Anne Boleyn’s copy of Tyndale’s English Bible, a compact and handy volume along the fore-edge of which she has written in red ‘Regina Angliae’. I am allowed to hold this Bible, as she must often have held it, and wonder if it’s the Bible she had with ...”

“... or ‘concrete monstrosity’. Those sneers are not directed at the popular amalgam born out of a collision between borrowings from Egypt, pre-Colombian America, the Ballets Russes, futurism, the trashier end of Cubism and the 1925 Paris Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs. The coinage ‘Art Deco’, possibly by the antiques dealer ...”

“... was only one Mediterranean coffee-making machine in the whole city, in the Coffee Inn in South Anne Street. And then you turn into South Leinster Street, where the bomb went off in 1974, and you wonder how many precisely it killed and why there is no memorial, and then try to remember what the bomb had sounded like – nothing much in fact, it was more the ...”

“... a Danish think tank, the Rockwool Foundation, reported on its investigations. Its team, led by Anne Frølich, found that Kaiser was better than the Danish health service at getting its constituent parts to work together, at getting patients to take responsibility for their own health and at preventing unnecessary hospital admissions. Everything was ...”

“... happy resolution to the problem is shown in the late novel Persuasion, when Wentworth, rejected by Anne Elliot’s family for lack of money, makes £25,000 capturing enemy ships in the Napoleonic Wars.) There is a parricidal aspect to inheriting an estate. The Halifax carpet factory finally closed in 1982, but money had been draining away from the business ...”

“... none of the women strikers who applied were given their jobs back.’ May Hobbs published a book, Born to Struggle, in 1973, then emigrated to Australia. What happened to Pat, Annie, Jean, all the others, I don’t know.This​ spring, I’d been meaning to bike round the feminism archives held in London: the Feminist Library in Peckham, the Women’s Library ...”