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“... Betty Cofer, a former slave of a plantation-owning family, in North Carolina: Here, in 1856, was born a negro girl, Betty, to a slave mother. Here, today, under the friendly protection of this same Jones family, surrounded by her sons and her son’s sons, lives this same Betty in her own little weather-stained cottage. Encircling her house are ...”

“... to reinforce the reputation of ‘the Palladium of public credit’. It is at this point that Anne Murphy takes her bird’s eye view of a day in the life of the bank. In her acknowledgments she expresses some apprehension about having plumped for this approach, but she need not have worried. This is a model of economic history, acute, profound and ...”

“... half a dozen essays a year to Blackwood’s Magazine, delivering on Bunsen, Savonarola, Queen Anne, Marco Polo and Jesus Christ. Her fluency brought her compliments on her ‘industry’ in which she detected ‘a delightful superiority’: she was a connoisseur of condescensions. It also brought her undisguised insults. Stung by Mrs Oliphant’s review ...”

“... section I’d been sustained by the endless seeming supply of Swallows and Amazons and Anne of Green Gables. And I liked the woodcuts by Joan Hassall used on each Bowen volume, which – though I still like them very much – I can now see are a few shades more sentimental and simplifying than the words inside. (Bowen in a 1968 letter to William ...”

“... whose creative work was allowed to lapse unexamined in a man’s world.But when Elizabeth Miller, born in 1907 and comfortably reared in Poughkeepsie, first arrived in New York and attracted public notice, she did it by typifying the post-Great War flapper, a new creature who threatened old norms of female being and behaviour. Fashion for young girls began ...”

“... was roaming the cold hills of Scotland. Defoe, who toured through the area where James Thomson was born, thought little of it: agriculture in Roxburghshire was in a pitiful state, the people suffering a terrible famine from the effects of bad weather in 1709. The first poem which made the young poet’s name – and marked him for life – was, not ...”

“... adrenal hormones in utero. One of the many consequences of this is that genetic (XX) females are born with ambiguous genitals, sometimes including a miniature penis and scrotum (genetic – XY – boys born with the condition have enlarged penises and reach puberty prematurely). The medical world regards the condition as a ...”

“... tease. Vasari’s ‘Monna Lisa’ certainly existed. She was Lisa di Antonio Maria Gherardini, born in Florence on 15 June 1479. She married Francesco di Bartolomeo del Giocondo in 1495, at the age of 16; he was a well-to-do businessman in his mid-thirties, already twice widowed. By 1503, the presumed earliest date for the portrait, she had borne two ...”

“... an old friend of Derrida’s, and an outstanding example of the philosopher-as-stranger. He was born into a Jewish family in Lithuania in 1905 and grew up speaking Russian and Lithuanian; he then learned German and biblical Hebrew, and after a few years in Ukraine added French to his repertoire, took a degree in philosophy at the University of ...”

“... of lemon juice and semen as secret inks, with talcum powder or perfume as fixatives. The Swedish-born Eva de Bournonville was found to have in her possession cakes of soap containing potassium ferrocyanide for invisible writing: she served six years in Holloway. The war was the making of MI5, which busied itself compiling a long register of aliens and ...”

“... out of Heathcliff. The Brontës’ father, Patrick, had pulled off the trick rather better. Born Patrick Brunty into a poor peasant family in County Down (still ‘Brontë country’ for the Irish today), he Frenchified his surname and made it to Cambridge, right-wing Toryism and a Yorkshire parsonage. But the Brontës’ Englishness never entirely ...”

“... Popa. He was both the product of his time and place and the inventor of his own world. Popa was born in 1922 in an area north of Belgrade called Banat, where the population was a mixture of Serbs, Germans, Slovaks, Hungarians and Romanians. His father was a record clerk and afterwards worked for a bank; his mother was a housewife. He went to school in the ...”

“... own changes of mind: ‘I want to show my humours as they develop, revealing each element as it is born.’ He speculates on whether he is playing with his cat, or she is playing with him. In ‘On the Lame’, he engages in some unhealthily extended musing on how he came to believe that cripples are better sexual partners than anyone else (he cites the ...”

“... Ehrenburg’s immense power to pull the strings of cultural life had devolved on his French-born secretary, Natalya Stolyarova. She had become the facilitator, the person to see for appointments, assurance that this or that coast was clear, permission to read this and that, and so on. Nothing is so striking about Ehrenburg’s identification with the ...”

“... Jesus ‘spiritually in a chaste and virginal body’. The German Dominican nun Christina Ebner, born in 1277, dreamed she was pregnant with Jesus, and that she held his baby form in her arms. Sometimes Mary allowed these lonely women to nurse her child, filling their virginal bodies with the satisfaction of the breast-feeding mother. In the 14th century, St ...”