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“... centre of “the King’s English” (Merry Wives, 1.4.5) (Chapter 2) and “the true-born Englishman” (Richard II, 1.3.273).’The result is challenging to read – there aren’t many sentences in Shakespeare’s Englishes which deploy fewer inverted commas and parentheses and references than the one I’ve just quoted – but ...”

“... in haste’, as he put it. They quarrelled and parted within months of the ceremony and Karl was born at Straiton, outside Edinburgh, to an effectively single mother. She passed him on to her own mother and her mother’s sisters in nearby Gilmerton, a working-class family whose older generation had worked in the pits of the Lothian coalfield around ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”