“... market, as he understood it. In 1873, he tells Tissot he is working on a picture specifically for Thomas Agnew; he also thinks that the firm might like to handle his early masterpiece Portraits dans un bureau, since it depicted the New Orleans cotton exchange; he presumed that Agnew’s, which had started in Manchester, would easily find a ...”

“... he half-recognises in a puzzled passage early in this book, he was not alone in that. Ivor Bulmer-Thomas and Lord Chalfont, he points out, also speak English with hardly a trace of a Welsh accent; and he wonders if there is something in the air or water of the Eastern Valley of Monmouthshire that washes away deviations from standard English. The answer is ...”

“... Planning Commission was supreme. Politically, they were socialist, though, as Bhagwati says, in Thomas Balogh’s sense, not Arthur Lewis’s. (‘Tommy,’ the distinguished St Lucian economist is reported to have said, ‘the difference between your socialism and mine is that when you think of socialism you think of yourself as behind the counter, whereas ...”

“... selves. Even when British aesthetics were imported into colonies wholesale meanings shifted. Thomas Metcalf remarks that the Parliament building in Ottawa, like Westminster, is an exercise in runaway Gothic: but whereas British Victorians favoured Gothic because they viewed it as their own indigenous style, Canadians might have employed it primarily to ...”

“... of these became cinemas. The Ideal on Lambeth Road, a Methodist chapel, was converted by the Rev. Thomas Tiplady in 1928 for screenings dedicated to ‘Cinema Evangelism’. The faces of the gathered few at the former Lambeth Workhouse shone with the conviction of true believers schooled to accept the occasional misconceived or inadequate sermon as the price ...”

“... was lent a copy of Buddenbrooks, Johannes ordered him to give it back at once: he considered Thomas Mann a traitor to the republic. It’s not surprising that under these family and political pressures, Fest went into a ‘difficult’ phase of rudeness and defiance that culminated with his carving a cartoon face of Hitler on the lid of his school ...”

“... political power, and is the more glaring when the form that power takes is force majeure. Contra Thomas Nagel and other US liberals, leaders who can segue fluently from blowjob to prayer-breakfast should give us pause for thought. The gospelling blag takes a darker turn in ‘the new military humanism’ or, in other words, killing people as an act of ...”

“... it was probably the eclectic nature of his output that had saved him from developing into a brand name: I don’t have a definite commodity … I’ve had oil-painting shows that were very realistic, then I’ve done jack-off collages, cut-outs one year and drawings … it’s all been different … People want to buy a Warhol or a person instead of a ...”

“...  Listen to Emily Wilson discuss Aristophanes with Thomas Jones on Among the Ancients, part of the LRB's Close Readings podcast. Find out more here.When​ Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion released ‘WAP’ in August 2020, ‘conservative’ commentators such as Tucker Carlson expressed outrage that the song might corrupt ‘your granddaughters’; Alyssa Rosenberg in the Washington Post celebrated it as an ‘ode to female sexual pleasure ...”

“... and bulimic vulgarity got the genius it deserved,’ only to write a little later, apropos of Thomas McEvilley’s remark that ‘somehow the age demanded’ Schnabel: ‘the notion that the man is an emanation of the Zeitgeist no doubt matches the artist’s fantasies about himself.’ It also, of course, matches what Hughes has just said about him. I ...”

“... Walsingham, Secretary of State to Queen Elizabeth, and preserved in the public imagination by Thomas Lant’s pictorial roll, was the grandest accorded to an English subject before Nelson: a determined show of strength by the forward Protestant party to which Sidney had belonged and in whose cause he became a martyr. Poets wrote elegies which answered to ...”

“... to have learned ‘many secrets of the business’ from him. She started manufacturing her own brand of sugar pills as a sideline to seamstressing. At first, she sold pills for lung ailments and stomach complaints, but when a woman came to her asking for something to induce a miscarriage she realised there was a still more lucrative market.Five dollars ...”

“... simplest things have to have a special aura or signature – or, let’s get real, a high-toned brand name. It has to be a certain Moleskine notebook. The pencil has to be Conté. The ink has to be from a little shop no one knows in the backstreets of Florence. (Full disclosure: like many writers, I too work with a special favourite pen – it’s a freebie ...”

“... a first bibliography, and respectful salutations from across the literary scene: Dylan Thomas emerged best from the exercise, warmly praising ‘a wide and deep poet’ before adding, impishly: ‘Congratulations on Auden’s seventieth birthday.’ He did indeed seem senior beyond his years. The issue had a double-page Faber advert, on one side of ...”

“... of homosexual fellatio’. Then he cools us down. ‘That is to move too far ahead.’ Thomas Carlyle, another prodigious filler of shelves, reckoned that ‘the history of the world is but the biography of great men.’ The pathos formula perfected by Ackroyd. Carlyle did not enjoy such a smooth passage. ‘Swimming in the Mother of Dead Dogs, and ...”