“... the writer takes courage and fills in the name: ‘Wheeler’. From this, Gates has identified John Hill Wheeler, a lawyer, functionary, plantation owner and sometime member of the state legislature of North Carolina, who became briefly famous through a 1855 court case in which he attempted to regain possession of a fugitive slave called Jane ...”

“... The pogrom in Limerick, which took place in 1904, was incited by the fiery preaching of Father John Creagh to the arch-confraternity: The Jews came to Limerick apparently the most miserable tribe imaginable ... but now they had enriched themselves and could boast of very considerable house property in the city. Their rags have been exchanged for ...”

“... It is John Ashbery who takes the cake – in this case, the triple-decker cake with the solitary little sugar bride on top – for his description of Elizabeth Bishop: she is ‘the poets’ poets’ poet’. It sounds farcical, but it’s strictly true, and there’s as little getting round it as there is improving on it ...”

“... to reinforce Leavis’s right to be called a major critic. To paraphrase Johnson’s remark on Gray and his ‘Elegy’, had he always written like this, it had been vain to blame, and useless to praise him. Critical commentary of this kind usually had its origin in the classroom. It was essential to Leavis’s project that he should be at the charismatic ...”

“... Russes dancer Tamara Karsavina; the photographer Berenice Abbott; modernist designer Eileen Gray; Jane Heap and Margaret Anderson, editors of the avant-garde literary magazine the Little Review; not to mention Colette, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Djuna Barnes, Romaine Brooks, Virginia Woolf, Janet Flanner, Vita Sackville-West, Greta ...”

“... for ‘When will my people be free?’‘For Scots with mixed [English and Scottish] parentage,’ John Lloyd wrote in the Financial Times in 2012, ‘a forced choice is uncomfortable. Should we, on the model of American blacks, claim “blackness” – or in this case Scottishness – as our dominant identity?’ Lloyd was not alone in feeling that his ...”

“... nebulous enemy from the other side of the world. It could be Bob Dylan performing his ‘Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues’ (‘I discovered there was red stripes on the American flag’); but the year is 2002, and the song is ‘Talkin’ Al Kida Blues’ (‘Cuba’s our enemy, unless we need a prison camp’). Al Kida is the name of a man who lives ...”

“... And the lead role has attracted all the dashers over the years, from Gerald du Maurier through John Barrymore and Ronald Colman to David Niven. I particularly enjoyed the Yorkshire TV series in the 1970s, with Anthony Valentine as a notably suave and sinister Raffles and Christopher Strauli as a frightened Bunny. The combination of mannered elegance and ...”

“... that these rebellions amount to much. They manifest themselves as the high seriousness of trivia (John Baldessari’s alphabetical list of the contents of his files of movie stills); as Native American bluster and vanity; as halfbaked intellectualism; above all, as the intoning of feminist and other contemporary cultural pieties. (Yvonne Rainer: ‘At this ...”

“... did not pick up popularity till after Walter Scott. ‘Valkyries’ were introduced to English by Gray in 1768, closely followed by Percy’s translation of the Swiss professor Paul-Henri Mallet’s Monuments de la mythologie et de la poésie des Celtes et particulièrement des anciens Scandinaves. But ‘berserkers’ did not appear till 1822, though by 1879 ...”

“... for example, a head as simple as a bean seed.) Later there were American connections – in 1916 John Quinn began collecting his work; he knew the photographers Edward Steichen and Man Ray – and Romanian connections, which were maintained all his life. There is hardly a significant name which does not turn up in some context or other, from Picasso and the ...”

“... exactly the same thing.’ In 1934, Jennings, a young artist and intellectual about town, joined John Grierson’s GPO Film Unit on a freelance basis, mainly, it seems, because he was hard up. He went on to become Britain’s most admired wartime documentary film-maker, and although his is far from a household name, his critical reputation has for decades ...”

“... and Kant. The ‘History will absolve me’ speech quotes, among other more famous names, John of Salisbury and John Knox. But as Szulc remarks, ‘one sees how his methodical mind subordinates all texts to his private interpretation.’ Castro had, and still has, a large appetite for information, but he appears to ...”

“... writing. Some examples: ‘She had a face like an upturned canoe,’ said by the actor Charles Gray at breakfast in Dundee (though of whom I can’t remember). A. I’ve been salmon fishing. B. It’s not the season. A. No. I thought I’d take the blighters by surprise. ‘Here we are. Fat Pig One and Fat Pig Two.’ Said by my mother when she and ...”

“... as a poet. ‘It is all a battle,’ he announced to his friend and partner in art, the painter John Minton. He and Dunsmuir lived in conditions of spectacular inconvenience: a poky caravan for some years and later a cottage to which the word ‘spartan’ doesn’t really do justice – ‘a leaking roof, no cooking stove, no electricity, an outside toilet ...”