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“... are first Peter, known as the Count, a Polish refugee, friend and former colleague of Guy; and Anne, college friend of Gertrude, recently emerged from 14 years in a convent. The Count is the only possible candidate for the ‘soldier’ of the title, and he becomes so only by virtue of a single metaphor, in which he is described as a conscript in the army ...”

“... This one is 572 pages long and it took the author twenty years to write. Longer than Katherine Anne Porter found to write the whole of her resplendent work. Joan Givner’s book might be called light plane reading, except that it is heartlessly grave, gravid though fruitless, and would take the most receptive astronauts a moon-flight to try to sleep ...”

“... In 1972 I started work on a study of Denys Finch Hatton and his relationship with Karen Blixen. The biographer’s nightmare is the knowledge that an important collection of papers pertaining to his subject is being withheld from him during research. When his subject is the more elusive half of a pair of lovers, the question immediately arises as to whether there can be a biography at all ...”

“... The Norwegian writer Per Petterson’s best-known novel, Out Stealing Horses (2005), won praise and prizes, and was an international bestseller. It opens with Trond, a man in his sixties who has retreated to longed for solitude in the woods, encountering another man late at night outside his house – the second man is worried because his dog keeps running off (there are wolves in the forest ...”

“... Or had we not? They said it was sad.                  I was born good, grown bad.                           And isn’t that how it always starts, this myth that ends with the girl ‘grown bad’?                           She’s in a meadow gathering flowers ...”

“... wore shaggy furs or sheepskins,the philosopher a heavy sweater. ‘It will be warmer after we’re born,’I said to Adamand he said,‘Of this I am not ...”

“... a good calm hanging tree – Priest, pray for me, it’s night in the city! Emile Nelligan was born on Christmas Eve 1879 in Montreal to an Irish father (David Nelligan) and a French-Canadian mother (Emilie-Amanda Hudon). Emile was a prize-winning student in his early years at school but surprised everyone by failing his final examinations at the Collège ...”

“... Cavendish, whose ‘wits were turned with solitude and freedom’, the obscure and melancholy Anne Finch, Elizabeth Carter, ‘the valiant old woman who tied a bell to her bedstead in order that she might wake early and learn Greek’, and of course her own creation, the mute inglorious poet buried opposite the Elephant and Castle, Shakespeare’s ...”

“... and the poem’s political and theological outlook matches Hutchinson precisely. Lucy Apsley was born in 1620, in the Tower of London. In an autobiographical fragment she claimed that by the time she was seven she had eight tutors and that she was taught Latin by her father’s express wish. She also tells the circumstances of her wooing by John ...”

“... groan, fetter, talons, torn chop, yellow slash, wild lip, no return of Prometheus? One who was born but could not die, it was illegal to have him in your home. The established church had risen to its feet. Bloodguilt blew out from under its brow, blood built a theatre. Air can witness. Folk keep starving. Their choice. What if soldiers, swallows, just ...”

“... and a Child’ (1940) by Henry Moore Both men’s careers were framed by war. Although Brandt (born 1904) was too young to have served in the First World War, Moore (born 1898) was not. In November 1917, he and his regiment were hit with mustard gas during the Battle of Cambrai, and invalided out. Two decades ...”

“... as they fell. Rather like the lamassu that inspired him, Rakowitz is something of a hybrid. Born in New York in 1973, he remains strongly linked to the traditions of his family, Iraqi Jews whose reigning patriarch, Nissim Isaac Daoud bin Aziz, emigrated from Baghdad to Long Island in 1946. With Daoud came Davisons & Co, his import/export business, which ...”

“... The sculptor​ Mária Bartuszová was born in Prague in 1936 and died sixty years later in Košice, Slovakia, three hundred miles to the east. It was in Košice that her career as a sculptor really began, after she moved, aged 27, to the city with her husband, the artist Juraj Bartusz, and their young daughter. A second child, also a girl, arrived in 1971 ...”

“... Wolfe’s declared autobiographies are Now a Stranger (1933) and The Upward Anguish (1938). He was born Berto Wolff, the son of a medium well-off Jewish family in the Bradford wool trade, who lived, he said, ‘in acute terror’ of having to enter the ‘trade’. His father died when he was only nine. His formidable mother, Consola, was from Genoa. She set a ...”

“... of Mark Twain:   My daddy run off from home when he was 15. Otherwise I’d of been born in Alabama.   You wouldnt of been born at all ...   I dont see why you say that. I’d of been born somewheres.   How?   Well why not?   If your mama had a baby with ...”