“... According to Oscar Wilde, before Dickens there were no fogs, and before Turner no sunsets. Wilde is merely exaggerating a truth, practising the art of aphorism, drawing our attention to this precept: we need art so that we can see what we are seeing. On his way to the Hebrides, Dr Johnson pulled down the blind on what a future generation of writers would take for their subject-matter – wild, ‘romantic’ nature ...”

“... the end not only of Haydon’s career, but of painting in ‘the tradition of Joshua Reynolds, James Barry and Benjamin West’. How convincing this argument is depends on how we view that ‘tradition’. Of the three artists only West, who found a royal patron with the necessary deep pockets and high ceilings, made a career as a history painter. Reynolds ...”

“... does not work, partly because her sabbatical coincides with that of a younger colleague, Fred Turner. Fred happens to be married to Zimmern’s daughter Roo; his trip to London to research into John Gay starts badly because he and Roo have quarrelled, and he has had to come to London without her. Arriving in damp mid-winter, he at first has to rely on the ...”

“... rework – had the dubious merit of having once painted stormy waves over a calm harbour scene by Turner. Ned did well enough at school to be allowed to study classics, and his classmates became his first real friends. He was attracted to religious ceremony, and arrived at Oxford in 1853 a fervent Tractarian: he dreamed of following in the footsteps of John ...”

“... theatre in which tier on tier of streets look out across the estuary to the mountains. Not only James Watt, but many painters, novelists and poets began here. After utter collapse, small citizens’ groups are trying to rub the old town back to life, to restore hope: a new theatre, the restoration of the huge ropeworks factory, a protest (why use cobbles ...”

“... on me, I set to work. When Hanson left Birmingham, Tara Prem inherited the project. She and Pedr James, the script editor, made numerous suggestions for improvement and the play’s final shape owes a lot to them. My intention was to take a television cliché – a kind of family reunion, a dinner party – and to transform it by degrees and by logical ...”

“... was brought up by his paternal grandparents, while Crippen ‘turned his sights east’. Cora Turner, born Kunegunde Mackamotzki, and later to restyle herself as Belle Elmore, was the daughter of a hard-up German immigrant family in Brooklyn. She had an (illegal) abortion, aged eighteen, after her domestic employer got her pregnant. Dr George Clinton ...”

“... Melba in a Paris street and asked her for money, she gave him what she had in her purse. But Henry James’s friend Morton Fullerton made a more typical response – he must have written this letter with Shakespeare’s play open on his desk: I am distressed to have left your touching appeal unanswered for so long. But I have been on congé in the patrie of ...”

“... Reed. The Beats were now heritage fodder, a potential Bloomsbury group. There was even talk of James Ivory optioning a Neal Cassady property. I wondered, thinking of Blake’s formative experiences there, whether Carolyn had caught any of Alan Bennett’s Westminster Abbey footage? Bennett, required to audition for the John Betjeman slot, couldn’t bring ...”

“... of thanking the Islamic Republic ‘for all the things it had taught me – to love Austen and James and ice cream and freedom’. She started a list under the title ‘Things I’ve Been Silent About’ when she began work on her first academic book, a study of Nabokov, and realised that she ‘could not frankly write about the political and social ...”

“... for Bush, Nader became a scapegoat for Democrats. ‘I will not speak his name,’ the strategist James Carville said. Nader himself remained unmoved; he ran again in 2004 and 2008. Along with these quixotic campaigns, he continued to sponsor citizen groups with agendas ranging from protecting Americans with disabilities to filing tort claims against ...”

“... Tailor – ‘a device so simple that it left him genuinely elated by its symmetry’. Clive James, writing in 1977, had similar feelings about the ‘symmetrical economy’ of The Spy who Came in from the Cold (1963). ‘It could,’ he said, ‘be turned into an opera.’ Le Carré – that is, David Cornwell, an ex-spy – once said that he entered ...”

“... meant something. In Wojas’s day, the idea of a radical act was to enter the whole club for the Turner Prize.There were certain especially instructive figures, among them Julian Maclaren-Ross, denizen of Fitzrovia, not least because his travails forever appeared to eclipse his talent. Although he was a very good writer indeed, the question of how he looked ...”

“... With American forces in Baghdad, Perle continued his rhetorical assault on Syria. He told Graham Turner, whose three-part article, ‘An American Odyssey’, appeared in the Daily Telegraph in June: ‘Somehow, we’ve got to isolate Assad and make him realise that there’s very little benefit in playing host to these people’ – i.e. Hizbollah and ...”

“... Tite Street was the family home; he did not return there. The spectre of Wilde haunted Henry James in the first two months of 1895, and James’s correspondence gives us a much richer sense than Wilde’s does of what the opening of a new play could mean at the turn of the 19th century. ‘Who shall deny the immense ...”