“... home from a tour of southern Italy. He spent three days arguing about art with the innkeeper’s young daughter ‘in a manner’, she wrote, ‘which opened my mind and taste for greater things’. She began to look beyond Zoffany to Joshua Reynolds and the dawning Romanticism among her contemporaries. She was sociable as well as talented, albeit somewhat ...”

“... in love. What matters is that in the fifteen years since he died she has managed to wean her ‘young soul’ from its yearning after his. Or not quite. The poem concludes with Rosina’s admission that she still harbours a taste for ‘memory’s rapturous pain’, even though she knows that any further indulgence in it would exclude her for ever from the ...”

“... drama narrated in the Sonnets and involving two personalities as well as the poet’s: the ‘fair young man’ and the ‘dark lady’. For a very long time – this approach still dominates at least the more conservative or biographical criticism – the Sonnets have been read as telling some kind of love story, the objects a man and a woman (Sonnets ...”

“... Welles sent detailed instructions for additional cuts, but they were ignored. An assistant editor, Robert Wise, was brought in to chop 30 more minutes out of the running time: half of the second half of the film. It was released on a double bill with Mexican Spitfire Sees a Ghost, and Welles was never again welcomed by the people in Hollywood with the money to ...”

“... the judge decided treatment wouldn’t be helpful. He was sent down for 20 years. In 1613, a young German girl, Maria Ostertag of Ellwangen, came to the authorities, confessed that she was a witch and implicated 34 other people. She had copulated with Satan in horrific secret rituals – his penis, she said, was hard, cold and hurtful. She also claimed ...”

“... when I asked him which of the other artforms novel-writing was most like.) Lennon captures the young Mailer drinking gin to be more like Hemingway. He sees him smarting at his father’s addiction to gambling and shadow-boxing around Brooklyn impersonating Rocky Graziano. He doesn’t quite explain Mailer’s pugilistic kind of heroism, but he portrays ...”

“... by sixpence a head. Then you had to set your sheep in a pasture, and send someone, perhaps a young servant like Jacob Jackson of Hurworth in County Durham, to mark their ears so that you knew which were yours (theft was common), and paint them with tar to keep them warm through the winter and spring. In June they would be brought down from the pastures ...”

“... deeply embarrassing. She told him he was ugly – despite his being unusually handsome from a young age, or because of this – and lashed out at him. He lived with her for only five years, walking out when she threw a bottle at his head. Hujar spent the rest of his life angry at her: he would refer to her by her full married name whenever he mentioned ...”

“... The Spectator, once suavely edited, now serves as a fraternity house for Douglas Murray, Toby Young, James Delingpole and Rod Liddle; pummelling Muslims and high-fiving on Brexit, these right-wing bros are to the posh periodicals what Jeremy Clarkson was to the BBC. Murray’s book-length screed, The Strange Death of Europe, is full of Trump-style ...”

“... Vendler to distort major figures helps her discriminate among lesser planets. Her inclusion of Robert Hayden, for example, is bold and welcome. Moreover, her promise to present writers ‘whole’ has more chance of being fulfilled with subsidiary figures. When Eliot judged anthologies less just to major than minor poets, he was, as often, lending his ...”

“... entirely fitting for a piece written within the context of marital negotiations, especially by a young and attention-seeking poet. Dunbar is the first writer in Scots who can legitimately be called a ‘Court poet’. The Scottish kings had no great tradition of encouraging literary patronage, and indeed for much of Dunbar’s career at James IV’s Court ...”

“... taken orders, Smith had gone as a gentleman’s tutor to Edinburgh, where he was welcomed by the young Turks of the Whig élite, with whom, in 1802, he founded the Edinburgh Review. Great wits don’t always readily agree, and there was another on the scene in the person of Henry Cockburn, whose career and reputation show several points of similarity with ...”

“... and excelled at debate. But Buchanan was a robust defender of popular sovereignty. He taught his young king about the sins of his mother. James learned about the brutality and the infidelities of the Scottish – specifically Stewart – monarchs. James VI came, Buchanan said, from ‘a bloody nest’. The perfect king, by contrast, would be a ‘lover of ...”

“... pre-Reformation who nobly gave his head to forces beyond his control. Most absurdly, because of Robert Bolt’s screenplay, this barrister of Catholic repression is widely envisioned as modernity’s diapason: the clear, strong note of individual conscience, sounding against the authoritarian intolerance of the Early Modern state. Thomas More died in ...”

“... Picasso had, after 1950, become Adolf Wölfli, or John Ford had ended up as John Cassavetes. Or if Robert Crumb had turned into his obsessive mad-genius brother, Charles Crumb. If thisweredrawn byKirby inthe 1970sit wouldbe a massivegleaminghystericallyhyperarticulatedpsychedelicedifice ...”