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“... will always be room for a further Life. The present one, by the art historians Ronald Anderson and Anne Koval, makes large claims. Whistler, say the authors, fabricated innumerable fictions about his own life, which he then began to believe himself, and his biographers (with the single exception of James Laver) have been gullible enough to go along with ...”

“... she told William Maxwell, her literary executor, ‘and I can imagine enjoying my own.’ She was born in 1893, an only child. Her father was a Harrow master, who, in a way not very complimentary to his profession (but quite right for STW), never sent her to school. She was allowed to study what she liked, and was devoted to him, emerging from the ‘benignly ...”

“... a painted-over figure, presumably a self-portrait. The order is thought to be, from left to right, Anne, Emily, Charlotte. Hassall compiled her scene from different sources: Patrick’s profile, with his distinctive high neckerchief (worn, we are told, because of his fear of bronchitis), was copied from a photograph taken late in his life, when all his ...”

“... the night there was no rest – only darkness …‘Nurse,’ moaned the dying girl, ‘what was I born into the world at all for?’‘If a way to the better there be,’ Thomas Hardy wrote, ‘it exacts a full look at the worst,’ and there’s an echo of Tess of the D’Urbervilles in what happens to Phemy: the President of the Immortals has his sport with ...”

“... forward and look round me at him, smile to herself and sit back again.’ When George’s daughter Anne was born in 1919 and son Michael in 1921, the sisters became enthusiastic babysitters and general chroniclers of their brother’s household. ‘I think George enjoys the thrill she gets when she gives her name in ...”

“... This is where William Pynchon, a key figure in Malcolm Gaskill’s new book, went to live in 1610. Born in 1590 in Writtle, another Essex village, he grew up to be a convinced Puritan, profoundly unsympathetic to the church of Charles I and William Laud. Gaskill exaggerates when he says that in the 1630s ‘Puritans were jailed or put to death,’ but the ...”

“... Nell,​ the narrator of Anne Enright’s The Wren, The Wren, can’t imagine real words coming out of her boyfriend’s mouth. ‘When I think about him talking, all he says is: Bloke, bloke bloke bloke. Blokey bloking bloke, bloke-bloke bloking.’ The boyfriend in question, Felim, a tall, taciturn farmer’s son, built like ‘a plastic model of what-goes-where’, turns out to have an interest in choking and taking non-consensual photographs of women ...”

“... Born in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1909, the daughter of two ‘outsider’ parents, an Ohian and a Virginian, Eudora Welty has made a life’s work of belonging. She wandered only briefly, to the University of Wisconsin and then to Columbia, NY, an episode which left no trace in her writing. Soon she was back with her mother in Jackson, where she lives to this day, setting almost all her work within a hundred-mile radius of her home ...”

“... date of 1900 for the year of his birth, which he variously gave as 1902, 1903, 1904 and 1905. Born in the village of Khorkom in Turkey, he later claimed Kazan, Tiflis and Nizhni-Novgorod as specific birthplaces, as well as Georgia and the Caucasus in general. His hatred of facts, evident in his false but always advantageous dating of his own pictures and ...”

“... a marriage, above all a marriage of minds, than treading on a spouse’s joke. Philip Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1933, and has characterised his childhood as that of ‘an all-American boy’. It’s not the obvious way to describe the experience of someone who lived in an almost wholly Jewish enclave of his city, attended Hebrew school three ...”

“... 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 ...”