“... lives unfulfilled and relationships cockpits of gladiatorial combat. Almost all the characters in Anne Enright’s superb new novel are spiritually damaged in one way or another, but we are not told exactly how they landed up like this, and it would seem churlish to inquire. Do you end up an alcoholic, like one of the characters here, because you have been ...”

“... more time at home.Vaughan’s life revolved around the two cities of London and Antwerp. He was born around 1500 into a London mercantile family of Welsh descent and was probably educated at St Paul’s School; he seems to have known its founder, John Colet. His father was an unsuccessful mercer, who committed the cardinal sin in mercantile terms when he ...”

“... she came to be in Dachau by her own deliberate choice is anything but simple. Lucette Mangione was born in Reims in 1925 to Italian parents. The family returned to Italy in 1938: first to Rome, and then, after 1943, following Mussolini’s government north to the Republic of Salò, where her father, a former pilot, was made undersecretary of aviation in the ...”

“... likely to have been 21 or 22 April. But it has become obvious that if the National Poet wasn’t born on St George’s Day it can only have been through an oversight which we have a duty to overlook. What is more immediately striking than the Armistice-Day-cum-carnival appearance of Shakespeare’s state birthday party, though, is its smell. Every member of ...”

“... published in the early Sixties, another full-length study might need some justification. But Anne Taylor has compressed Besant’s inordinately eventful ‘lives’ into a managable book half the size of Nethercot and pulled the threads together into a single life. Both contemporaries and earlier biographers tended to divide Besant’s career into two ...”

“... youngest daughter, Sophia, Electress of Hanover, who stood to succeed her second cousin Queen Anne. In the end, Anne outlived Sophia by a couple of months, whereupon Elizabeth’s grandson Georg Ludwig became Britain’s first Hanoverian monarch, George I, in 1714.Akkerman is well-placed to write a Life of Elizabeth ...”

“... on the doorstep. To begin with I was alone, serenaded by an unseen drunk in the run-down Queen Anne house opposite who screeched over and over again – Fucking cunt! Fucking cunt! – until someone came and shut the front door. Then I was joined by the harassed-looking proprietor of our establishment who puffed on a filter-tip while admitting ...”

“... concludes by listing his main sources. His tale is startling and intriguing. Aurora Rodriguez, born 1890, daughter of a Spanish attorney of advanced political opinions, develops in adolescence idiosyncratic views about sexual politics and child-rearing. When she comes of age she advertises for a man to father the child she proposes to bring up ...”

“... on, sustained by his mother’s favourite quotation (which stands as the novel’s epigraph): Anne Frank’s ‘In spite of everything, I still believe people are really good at heart.’ But, of course, Anne wrote that before the Germans got her. Thomas Keneally likes to run his fiction close to historical fact. An ...”

“... Hon. Robert L. Ehrlich, Jr (Extension of Remarks – 4 June 1997) Henrietta Lacks was born in 1920 in Clover, Virginia. At the age of 23 she moved to Turner’s Station, near Baltimore, Maryland, joining her husband David. She had five children, four of whom – Deborah, David Jr, Lawrence and Zakariyya – still survive. Ms Lacks was known as ...”

“... of what he considers his own best self.At the other end of the spectrum, consider Twombly. Born in Lexington, Virginia in 1928, his modernist conception of self and selfhood was quite different from Keats’s. He loved books and his inspiration was often literary; his paintings feature handwritten words inscribed in such a way as to avoid offering any ...”

“... his indelibly quirky, archaising versions, Pound favoured the verse of the bellicose Bertran de Born (whom Dante condemned to hell as a fomentor of strife) and the virtuosic Arnaut Daniel (Dante’s miglior fabbro or ‘better craftsman’ – a compliment T.S. Eliot borrowed in dedicating The Waste Land to Pound). Despite moments of irritating ...”

“... through the hands of less enthusiastic publishers has been recorded in various gossip columns. Anne Smith, editor of the Literary Review, is a canny publicist for herself and her journal. Now, at last, we have this already much-read work to review. The Magic Glass is transparently a version of the author’s childhood, some thirty years ago in Fife (here ...”

“... than Lindbergh’s. Half a century ago, nobody’s name was bigger than Lindy’s. Lindbergh was born in Little Falls, Minnesota, the son of a Congressman; his parents parted when he was 14. He left school at 16, learned farm work, dropped out of an engineering course at the University of Wisconsin, and joined a flying circus. To drum up business, he would ...”

“... for his plummy fans any more than, say, J.G. Ballard should be blamed for the flakiness of his, or Anne Tyler for the limpness of hers. As for the books, they speak for themselves. Edmund Wilson once remarked of Powell that ‘he’s just entertaining enough to read in bed late at night in summer.’ This was presumably intended as a put-down, but to anyone ...”