“... had been done to death. Another 162 had been injured, many of them maimed for life. Most were young and working-class. Many were of Irish origin. Not a single one of them could by any stretch of the imagination be held responsible for or even sympathetic to British government policy in Northern Ireland. The universal horror at this, the biggest killing of ...”

“... The Path of Hope, an over-sentimental tribute to Sicilians forced to leave the sulphur mines.) The young mother in Chiara Samugheo’s series The Children of Naples (1955), clutching a toddler to her chest, her mouth twisted as she glares at the camera, could be one of the Eumenides. Franco Pinna’s portrait from 1953 of a radiant Calabrian peasant ...”

“... back to ancient Egypt and the correlation of beauty with power would probably not have caused any young woman to lift an eyebrow, let alone to dream of collagen implants. Monumental images were limited (no movie screens or giant billboards) and controlled (no nubile lovelies cavorting on the TV in the living-room), so that beauty could become one of the ...”

“... Born in 1740, the heir of a cool, clever Lowland laird and lawyer, he became very rapidly a young literary lion, an acquaintance of Rousseau and Voltaire, the close friend, not just of Samuel Johnson, but of a broad sample of London’s cultural and fashionable élite, the celebrated biographer of the Corsican nationalist, Pasquale Paoli, a man, or so ...”

“... at court. Pampered, dominated, and early inculcated in the family trait of nonchalant arrogance, young William became a fashionable and good-looking presence in high society without acquiring the vigour and determination necessary to kindle his innate intelligence. Shortly after becoming heir to the Melbourne title in 1805, he took the unstable Caroline ...”

“... taken art on as a sideline. Even the rival giants of American art criticism when Fried was a young man, Harold Rosenberg and Fried’s own mentor Clement Greenberg, started out wanting to be all-round literati before becoming specialists in the fine arts; but Fried, who was one of the first wave of art critics to have a PhD in art history, seems to have ...”

“... twinklers of an hour, provoke my rage’) for Pope himself. Gerrard follows Howard Weinbrot and David Fairer in championing Hill’s biblical odes The Creation (1720) and The Judgment Day (1721) as significant expositions of the sublime in an age addicted to correctness; but the argument isn’t likely to persuade readers confronted by lines as poor as the ...”

“... Such donnish tolerance was rare. The most ferocious analyst of his immaturity was probably David Holbrook, whose account of Thomas’s ‘infantile egocentricity’ in Llareggub Revisited (1962) represents a high-water mark of Leavisite moralism. Thomas shows ‘an impotence of language belonging to an impotence in living’, Holbrook said, and quoted ...”

“... the 1950s, inspired by a catalogue of prints made by the paradoxical Dutch artist M.C. Escher, the young Penrose and his psychiatrist-geneticist father, Lionel, set out to produce drawings of ‘impossible objects’. Pictorial conventions cue us to perceive two-dimensional drawings as representations of three-dimensional things, but these conventions can also ...”

“... Now that Updike’s an elder statesman in the world of letters, an elfin figure pared down to a David Levine caricature of himself, a newer generation of detractors (replacing the ones that died off) has reserved him a room at the retirement home and seems irritated that he won’t take the hint. In recent interviews and articles he acknowledges the testy ...”

“... here rather than an error. Still, I don’t think we need to see Joyce as being disingenuous – David Greetham wonders about this in an essay in a booklet accompanying the new edition of Finnegans Wake – since we know what he could do with bits and scraps. In his letter he continues: ‘But then I never read Rabelais either though nobody will believe ...”

“... Yankee games on the radio, recalculating each player’s batting average after every time at bat. Young Ralph was on the way to becoming a strange and difficult man. Nader’s work habits, ambition and obsession with detail got him to Princeton, where the number of dead birds on campus led him to demand an investigation into DDT (a decade before Rachel ...”

“... of placating her, Begley says: The image that recurs again and again in his writing is of that young boy lying on the floor, busily drawing or tracing or colouring, or doing the same at the dining room table under the stained-glass lampshade, reproducing the comics and cartoon characters that he so loved, already certain that his efforts would meet with ...”

“... dreamed up much of the look, the attitude and the lyrics, though not the sound. A full year before David Bowie adopted the same hair style, Westwood had her hair bleached blonde and cut ‘coupe-sauvage’ style: tufty, asymmetrical and barmy-looking. She went to America and dressed the New York Dolls. Together, she and McLaren assembled the Sex Pistols, whom ...”

“... the elect separated out from the reprobate? Even ‘Calvinism’ was ticklish. As David Hall points out, not all Calvinists shared the same eschatology, disagreeing about what happened to souls after death.The question of whether to award the capital ‘P’ or not remains a subject of contention among historians. For Hall, a history professor ...”