“... in her. Things changed in the 20th century. Indeed, the modern age has overturned the assertion of White Kennet, an early 18th-century bishop of Peterborough, that ‘Qu. Elizabeth had a Camden, and King Charles a Clarendon, but poor James I has had I think none but paltry scribblers.’ The rise of the historical novel and the popular biography has produced a ...”

“... the rejected; the meaty, the monstrous, the mathematical. (See also Renaud Camus’s Tricks, or Edmund White’s States of Desire: to the company of Byron’s ‘Princess of Parallelograms’ we should add the type of the counting-house trickster, the stud-libertine for whom quantity is quality.) I approach the corpus of Mapplethorpe, and the life ...”

“... and artists it included than for those it didn’t (Hemingway, Dewey, Mencken, Salinger, Thurber, Edmund Wilson, Nabokov) and for those who, having joined, resigned (Thomas Hart Benton, Lewis Mumford, John O’Hara, Yvor Winters, Ezra Pound). Nor was it famous for anything it actually did: for years its main business was merely to perpetuate itself by ...”

“... these days. A candidate who lacks basic qualifications (and hence could not present himself in a white toga) is a ‘nigrate’. The Maltese censors who finally allow Toomey his copy of Thomas Campion’s poems confuse the poet with the English martyr Edmund Campion. (Some autobiography there, I ...”

“... Andrew Sullivan, ‘azza’ declarations – ‘as a colleague of David Simpson’; ‘as a white, middle-class male’ – in the age of identity politics. ‘Agonise’ is the right word here: every page of his book radiates anger, frustration and impotence at a situation in which the obsession with situation is itself the problem. For underlying the ...”

“... to write ‘murderous’ rather than ‘dangerous’ in ‘On a Picture of a Black Centaur by Edmund Dulac’: ‘ I knew that horse-play, knew it for a murderous thing.’ Arnold and Pater will be quoted accurately. So also will ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, The Waste Land, ‘Ash-Wednesday’, ‘Marina’ and ‘Burnt ...”

“... from cheerfulness to death, without it seeming so dark or sordid a journey. The hotels were white. ‘They come here to die,’ wrote the man who laid out the gardens by the pier at Bournemouth. ‘Let us make death beautiful.’ The Royal National Sanitarium opened in 1855, followed by specialised ‘homes’ for invalid ladies, or for consumptives who ...”

“... A copy is beside me as I write (I was junior counsel for the defence), alongside The Little White Schoolbook, a sanctimonious rebuttal that was handed out by evangelical demonstrators on the steps of the court. Taking its cue very obviously from Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung, Handyside’s book set out to reassure older children that the adult ...”

“... one and a half, in which the plentiful photographs are reproduced, not very well, between regular white margins. The result looks like a respectable ‘art book’ designed thirty years ago. The pin-striped book production does not, however, preclude eccentricity. The Laocoön statue is reproduced both on page 138 and on page 171 – in, moreover, exactly the ...”

“... A Girl in Winter. She existed mainly, it seems, to keep a few Oxford friends – Bruce Montgomery (Edmund Crispin), Diana Gollancz and the dreadful Kingsley Amis – amused. Brunette’s work was read aloud to Montgomery and Gollancz after evenings at the pub, and its progress discussed in salacious detail in letters designed to persuade Amis that Brunette’s ...”

“... prudence. Unlike Peter Ackroyd, Holroyd doesn’t insert fictional passages; nor does he emulate Edmund Morris’s insertion of himself – as a schoolboy – into a life of Ronald Reagan. But he’s there nonetheless. It’s been possible to detect Holroyd’s presence in his narratives before: no one who read the third volume of his Shaw biography could ...”

“... and historical canon largely involved the insertion, repudiation or reordering of a cast of dead white males. Since then, there have been efforts to expand disciplinary canons to incorporate more women and greater racial and ethnic diversity. At first glance, the inclusion of Catharine Macaulay’s writings in the influential Cambridge Texts in the History ...”

“... display of anamorphosis. What appears, when viewed head on, to be a large, greyish-white streak between the men’s feet resolves, when viewed from the side, into a skull which seems to project from the wooden panel. Although most of Holbein’s surviving paintings are not signed, this one is. On the floor behind and to the left of ...”

“... kind of job and are bound to get to the real boss, ten to one you are brought up against a little white-faced Jew in a bath-chair with an eye like a rattlesnake. Yes, sir, he is the man who is ruling the world just now.’Hannay is sceptical about the ‘Jew-anarchists’ but notes that his neighbour’s tales of international financiers stirring up chaos for ...”

“... where his artisan father practised his trade as a glover and ‘whittawer’ – a worker of white leather, typically kidskin, and thus a producer of those ‘kid gloves’ still proverbial for their softness. The product was upmarket but the production of it messy and pungent. When Shakespeare mentions a man with a ‘great round beard, like a ...”