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“... is just how compromised he was. He came from a very ordinary lower-middle-class family. He was born in 1886 near the Holloway Road, not far from where the Pooters famously resided. For part of his childhood the family lived in St Albans but Williams was always a great Londoner, a man as entranced by the city streets as Dickens or Charles Lamb; in his last ...”

“... a novel and gets cross if an autobiography doesn’t spring out. Liverpool – Bainbridge was born on its outskirts in 1932 – provided the background to her early books. But in the view of George Melly, also from the city, it left her and her prose with something more fundamental: a specific flavour. As a jolly man who loved to sing the ...”

“... a young woman; a woman with a sunny disposition, a tan and the general demeanour of someone born into a country where it never rains. These films were ubiquitous in my youth; I can still recall every glint and gleam of Jack Nicholson’s dodgy grin as he frolicked across the beach with – and I wish I had a better descriptor – some young one.So what ...”

“... origins or hinting at Iberian sympathies – and the look on Donne’s face suggests he knows it. Born in London in 1572, a year after a doomed international conspiracy to replace Elizabeth I with her papist cousin Mary, Queen of Scots, Donne was, as Katherine Rundell puts it in her new biography, ‘not just Catholic … but super-Catholic’, the scion of a ...”

“... bound to a stake. Volatility in this book is left to King Henry, tantrums and petty revenge to Anne Boleyn, sulks and tactlessness to Stephen Gardiner, fuming at upstart nobodies to His Grace the Duke of Norfolk. Cromwell, without title and for a long time without proper position, moved quietly ever forward. It all​ began in Putney, a few miles upriver ...”

“... Saint-Honoré; there is both high myth and low farce, decorum and kitsch, romance and smut. He was born in a wealthy suburb of Paris, Maisons-Laffitte, in 1889, into a prosperous Catholic family, a ‘bourgeois world’ where ‘we played tennis on one another’s courts.’ ‘Jean Cocteau loved his childhood,’ Arnaud writes, ‘as a country of its ...”

“... had grown to 57 inches and his waist to 54! The description of poor Henry’s impotence towards Anne of Cleves is vividly done. His intentions were absolutely of the best. He told Cromwell that despite the fearful let-down of the Holbein portrait, he did not propose to allow disappointment to get the better of him, although ‘if it were not to satisfy the ...”

“... what had become a heavily commercialised literary culture, but what do we know about how a woman born in 1652 might have imagined a future for herself as a writer and thinker? Barker published six books between 1688 and 1726, and so wasn’t completely ‘hidden from history’ as so many women were, but she was a ‘close inhabitant of obscurity’, little ...”

“... to one half of a telephone conversation. When not chatting, Clary tends to declaim: ‘I was born into my skin and its future, the planet and its promise or demise. Each day a similar sun, the almost predictable moods of the moon, seasonal weather holding its shape for planned vacations.’ No careful writer of poetry or prose would allow that ‘almost ...”

“... Agincourt anniversary year saw the publication of several books devoted to the battle itself. Anne Curry sets out, as far as it is possible, what actually happened on 25 October 1415. The battle was not a decisive one, and did not force the French into negotiating, let alone surrender; Henry V didn’t wish to fight it, but was trapped into doing so; his ...”

“... pair of essays by David Fallow and Michael Wood on the subject of his parents: John Shakespeare, born in about 1530, the son of a tenant farmer in the outlying village of Snitterfield, and Mary née Arden, some years younger, of a more prosperous family from Wilmcote. Neither of their baptisms is documented, nor the date of their marriage, which was sometime ...”

“... what they could to resist. It was a version of history embodied by the most famous onderduiker, Anne Frank. As Yael van der Wouden wrote in an essay a few years ago, the Dutch tend to tell a particular version of Frank’s story: she was ‘mostly Dutch and only a little Jewish’; the Germans were ‘bad and occupied Amsterdam, and the Dutch people were ...”

“... humanation of a god’. But St Matthew makes it clear that the Magi had come to see the new-born King of the Jews. They had no reason to doubt that the baby was human, so if the old Magus was really doing what Steinberg supposes, it could only be to satisfy himself that the child was not a girl. In his discussion of such paintings Professor Steinberg ...”

“... he allowed her to leave England. Ms Johnson has plenty of good ‘foreign’ stuff: the humbly-born Minister of Education who comes with his collection of slides to address the American Wives: ‘My father had seven donkeys and a camel and many goats. Therefore we were rich, yet I could not read, nor could my parents.’ The finale of his show is a slide ...”

“... so forth. Two of the girls prosecuted for bearing bastards were married before the children were born, and two women prosecuted for ‘harbouring’ pregnant women had been housing their own daughters. Drunkenness and riot, on the one hand, and the weight of ecclesiastical discipline, on the other, could arouse formidable resentments. It should, by now, be ...”