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“... of nearly a century of hindsight to the idea of frock consciousness, an idea that I think was not born but at least much heightened in that period between the world wars just as Woolf was trying to put her finger on it. If human character did, as she famously suggested, change in or about 1910, women’s clothes changed very soon afterwards. Another product ...”

“... explain the near-obsession with the war among writers who were children at the time, or not even born. Richler prints a vivid – and typically too-brief – extract from Staring at the Sun by Julian Barnes (b. 1946), although nothing from Shuttlecock, by Graham Swift (b. 1949), which gives the best description I know of the territory, real and ...”

“... has produced a book that artfully blends cloak-and-dagger with apologia. The future spymaster, born during the inflation of 1923, was brought up in a leftwing family. His Jewish father was a doctor and radical playwright who believed in vegetarianism, homeopathic medicine, free love and Communism. Markus and his brother Konrad were educated at a ...”

“... Wyld, were part of a fleet of drivers assembled by Lily de Gramont. Dolly Wilde joined them. Anne Morgan, daughter of J.P. Morgan, started the ‘heiress corps’ with her partner, Anne Murray Dike. For many, it was liberating. Women referred to one another by their surnames, as if they were soldiers or schoolboys, or ...”

“... bizarre legislative expressions of Protestant paranoia) own a horse worth more than £5.Pope was born in 1688, the year of the Glorious Revolution, which for Catholics was rather less glorious than it was to their Protestant countrymen. Despite his size, his religion, and the sinister nominative determinism of his name, he managed while still in his twenties ...”

“... them. As he hadn’t there was something sinful about music lessons.’ Much of the early part of Anne Sebba’s new biography concerns Ethel’s love of Yiddish theatre and her own theatrical ambitions. She was named ‘class actress’ in a high school that produced Tony Curtis (born Bernard Schwartz), Zero Mostel and ...”

“... Menocchio extracted the view that there were good men in all religions: but ‘since I was born a Christian I want to remain a Christian, and if I had been born a Turk I would want to live like a Turk.’ From the rather surprising source of Boccaccio’s Decameron Menocchio drew the conclusion that ‘each person ...”

“... The last occasion on which the crown refused its assent to legislation had been in 1708 when Queen Anne rejected the Scottish Militia Bill. Without a veto, monarchy was a cipher, and could not claim co-ordinate authority with the other branches – Lords and Commons – of a notionally tripartite constitution. However, under the convenient veil of a notional ...”

“... anxious about recent flood warnings, and down in Portsmouth to buy a new yacht. As a Pompey girl, born and bred next to the football ground in Fratton, I naturally know nothing at all about sailing (though I know that ‘F’ stands for frigate and chanted ‘Boney was a warrior, rah, rah, rah!’ in the playground, assuming it referred to a skeleton). I nod ...”

“... the infant’s breath fatally to escape its body, puff by puff. Lucia was defiant. ‘It was not [born] alive, and I will never be able to say why it was not, and I cannot do anything about this, I cannot supersede the one who is the master of the whole world: it pleased God that it was born dead, and I don’t know what to ...”

“... Scotland and England which her son James VI and I would attempt and her great-great-granddaughter Anne (assisted by that parcel of rogues) would finally achieve. If the 16-year-old Mary hadn’t prematurely tried to invent the United Kingdom by having herself proclaimed in Paris as rightful ‘Queen of Scotland, England and Ireland’ within days of ...”

“... drawing and pastel lessons from her father, the society portraitist Louis Vigée; her contemporary Anne-Rosalie Bocquet, who died on the guillotine during the Terror, studied at a drawing school run by her mother. In later decades, however, progressively smaller numbers of Parisian female exhibitors came from artistic households. The majority received ...”

“... own big sister, 16 years her senior and already pregnant and off to Glasgow when Janice is barely born; only to flounce back home to Saltcoats, ‘clawed . . . free from motherhood and sprung like a steel trap’ in 1960, when Janice is nearly five. There are good things about having such a sister, especially when she gets a job in an Italian ice-cream ...”

“... just as resentment against British rule was reaching the point of explosion. Flora MacDonald was born exactly three hundred years ago and was 24 when Bonnie Prince Charlie lurched into her life. The new biography by Flora Fraser (who is named after her subject) intends to sift out a ‘real Flora’ from the spoil heap of sentimental legend. That means ...”

“... in the more common contemporary spelling, the one he used in his only extant signature – was born in the parish of St George, Canterbury, in February 1564. He was the son of John Marlowe, shoemaker, and Katherine née Arthur, a Dover woman. They had nine children, though only five survived childhood. Christopher was the eldest son, and after the death of ...”