“... by Thomas Gainsborough, Joshua Reynolds, Arthur Devis, John Opie, Jonathan Richardson and Richard Cosway, among others. The small, unattributed canvas he disposes of in 1928 is not in the same league. But it does come with an intriguing back story. Most of Henry Howard’s family’s wealth originally came from sugar plantations worked by enslaved ...”

“... of the earlier volumes, but, having made available one of the finest collections of letters in English, he could afford to ignore them. It is easy to see that Shaw irritated people in late as in early life. Being vain and assertive, or finding it convenient to wear a mask of assertive vanity, he writes in the same breezily authoritative tone on virtually ...”

“... be confined to university departments of literature. This desire to ‘keep philosophy pure’ (in Richard Rorty’s phrase) has more to do with professional self-esteem than with the interests of reason and truth. Territorial imperatives were clearly at stake when John Searle (in a recent number of the New York Review of Books) gave a simplified account of ...”

“... Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann’.) Kaye offered to translate Jobert’s speech, to be given in English, into French, so that his French colleagues would understand what their minister was saying. But after Jobert had delivered an elegant toast in English, Danny Kaye got up and spoke French-sounding gibberish in a ...”

“... to be found mainly among the professional middle classes, that ran through the Forties’. Yet Richard Acland, figurehead of the Party, had been a Liberal MP before the war, and Common Wealth might be placed on the far left wing of that broad informal alliance of reformers which produced what Addison calls ‘Forties collectivism: the belief in the ...”

“... of the impending DISASTER were the show to go ahead, and the items were hurriedly withdrawn. When Richard Offner ventured some mildly incredulous notices of an exhibition in 1924, Berenson’s fury knew no bounds, and he severed relations with the erring disciple. There were instances, admittedly (though none too many), when he stubbornly refused to gratify ...”

“... retrospectively – to condition his or her subject’s story by reading in from the work itself. Richard Bradford’s recent life of Larkin, First Boredom, Then Fear, seems to illustrate the belief that the man who wrote ‘Mr Bleaney’ and ‘High Windows’ must have lived like Mr Bleaney but with higher windows: Bradford describes him, during 1955, as a ...”

“... How does​ Shakespeare look, after #MeToo and Black Lives Matter? Scenes of sexual coercion, from Richard III to Pericles, have become more immediate. In Measure for Measure, Isabella’s predicament – should she agree to sleep with Angelo, corrupt deputy to the Duke of Vienna, in order to save her brother from execution? – gets audiences on her side ...”

“... Pynchon was born on Long Island, New York in 1937. He studied engineering, physics and, later, English literature, at Cornell University, then worked as a technical writer for Boeing until 1962. Not long after that, he more or less disappeared from public view. His fame rests primarily on what can for convenience be thought of as his three great novels of ...”

“... of bullion, the Spanish monasteries ‘were well placed to make loans’, the late historian Richard Fletcher noted – they were sites of intercession in both finance and prayer.Berend shows that the violence on the ground cut across doctrinal divides, with Christian raiders pillaging Christian abbeys. During El Cid’s lifetime there wasn’t yet a ...”

“... and authorship in the past thirty years. Very good entries on Law (Ross Cranston), Culture (Richard White) and on K.R. Murdoch (David Bowman) are exceptions to the general level. Even granting their own terms – those of closed and authoritative, rather than open and provisional history – the Dictionary and chronology could be much more ...”

“... a quotation labouring to attain a modicum of reality. Not so much a dry David Hockney splash as Richard Wilson’s site-specific installation 20:50: his tank of sump oil, miraculously transubstantiated into this brilliant new substance, a liquid thicker than jelly but lighter than air. A seductive mosaic carpet across which you cannot walk without ...”

“... then switch to the stark monochrome field of Horses, and other images waiting in the wings: Richard Hell, Iggy Pop, the Ramones. It really was, as the old cliché has it, that black and white. There was no commando unit of primpy stylists for Smith in 1975 – just her, Mapplethorpe and (as related in her 2010 memoir, Just Kids) a few quick shots one ...”

“... the wrong people in the wrong place at the wrong time. The Guardian’s defence correspondent, Richard Norton-Taylor, sends me an email from London which he received from Simon Wren, an MoD press officer. Wren is ranting about my colleagues’ earlier reports on how soldiers haven’t got enough toilet paper, aren’t getting decent food and haven’t got ...”

“... street, outside the Tory White’s club, two gentlemen have been hanged from a lamp-post by the English armée du people, and one of them is Canning. His face is very small.Only Gillray could have rendered the anti-revolutionary mood with such comprehensive hysterics – the whole crowd of figures suspended between fear and fervour, with something weirdly ...”