“... precious stones. It was produced mainly in London, but there were provincial embroiderers too, at York, Norwich, Colchester, and possibly Exeter, and it could be bought at regional fairs. But its reputation was international. The chronicler Matthew Paris described Pope Innocent IV’s greedy reaction to these sophisticated English products: ‘Truly, England ...”

“... Bacon as menacing as ever. He has not petered out, and even his critics admit his achievement. Peter Fuller who ‘turns away from Bacon’s work with a sense of disgust and relief’ also describes him as ‘a good painter, arguably the nearest to a great one to have emerged in Britain since the war’. And greatness is, Bacon says, the only thing worth ...”

“... from distinguished universities.’ By some unscientific coincidence, the current issue of the New York Review of Books carries a full-page advertisement announcing ‘a scientific dissent from Darwinism’. Most of the page is taken up by the names of a hundred or so scientists who are ‘sceptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural ...”

“... Number 188, to the west of St Dunstan’s Church, opposite Ye Olde Cock Tavern, and in an echo of Peter Blayney’s central themes (the business of books, and the Reformation), close to the publishers D.C. Thomson (the Beano, the Dandy, Scotland’s Sunday Post) and the Protestant Truth Society. The printer Richard Pynson worked from here; the black-letter ...”

“... in a house which can also accommodate Nicholas when he is not living with his mother in New York. In May I went back to America to receive an honorary degree from Bard, a small Liberal Arts College at Annandale on the Hudson. I had taught there for one day a week in 1948, as a means of supplementing my salary as a Visiting Professor at New ...”

“... the true nature of the Underworld’ in a notebook. His wife Bettina, who has fantasies about New York, deceives him with a coarse American, and, messy amorist, visits her husband in hospital while leaking this man’s semen, though she presumably passes within range of a lavatory on her way to the ward: the book has quite a lot of fast-moving, gripping and ...”

“... of victory. So was everybody else. ‘I’ll admit it,’ Michelle Goldberg wrote in the New York Times. ‘I let the right, and political analysts who were listening to the right, psych me out.’But the ‘red wave’ did not materialise. Instead, the Democrats pulled off the strongest midterm showing by a party occupying the White House in two ...”

“... years, his dark, formally self-conscious entry onto the scene of the American novel with The New York Trilogy, an elaborate anti-detective volume full of Hawthorne, Melville and Thoreau. Despite its grand title it had been rejected 17 times before a publisher brought it out in 1985; yet it became, at the chic end of the market, a ‘best seller’, and ...”

“... Anyone who knew anything about music – who had perhaps followed the perplexed reviews in the New York Times – could tell you how he had managed to transform the piano into a one-man percussion ensemble by wedging nails, bolts and erasers between its strings; or how he had – ‘and you’re never gonna believe this’ – somehow composed silent ...”

“... figures to lend him a cloak of respectability. Figures such as Haines, Bernard Donoughue and Peter Jay, the former British ambassador in Washington – some of the stars of the Labour governments of the 1970s – were happy to be signed up to Maxwell’s payroll. The case of Haines was especially striking: when Maxwell bought the Mirror, in 1984, Haines ...”

“... to be rescued, but it looked as if only a miracle, or a great power, could help them. In New York, the day after the Armistice, the Emergency Rescue Committee was formed by a group of European refugees and American academics and journalists, with the ambitious aim of saving ‘cultural Europe’. Lion Feuchtwanger was on the list of refugees in danger ...”

“... of the harbour at Belle-Ile, broadly painted in bright colours, marks the influence of John Peter Russell, the Australian artist, who’d been a friend of Van Gogh. At the end of that year Matisse painted The Dinner Table – quite big, more than three feet by four – a late Impressionist interior, innocuous enough one might think, yet the first in a ...”

“... divorced. Dee took her to England, borrowed a house and wrote about ‘London life’ for the New York Times, until the Sunday Express hired her as its book reviewer. Gully’s father took her for holidays ‘in his snappy white Mercedes convertible with the red leather seats’, and it all suited her ‘admirably’: though both parents had a string of ...”

“... Evans compares McEnroe to Coriolanus and Julius Caesar, with quotations from Shakespeare and from Peter Levi on Shakespeare. He uses adjectives like ‘pavonine’, and describes McEnroe’s style as pointilliste – rather a good idea, except that it leads to an analysis of pointillism: ‘tiny jabs of colour executed with the deft touch of a true ...”

“... past three years, while the building works were ongoing, the paintings have been on tour to New York, Dallas and Jerusalem. Earlier this year they returned to Auckland Castle, where they were put back on display along with a faithful copy of the 13th painting in the series – the portrait of Benjamin, Jacob’s youngest son, which hangs at Grimsthorpe ...”