“... in steaming from his work in the fields, observed: “What an odalisque.” Bruce’s italics.’ George Melly is startled that Chatwin has never heard of the Muppets. Don McCullin, on a picture assignment for the Sunday Times magazine, rings at a grand house in Holland Park to find Chatwin standing behind the front door, ‘like Miss World’ – he ...”

“... to quit was Ismaïl Cem, the Foreign Minister, a respected intellectual whose warm relations with George Papandreou, his Greek counterpart, led to the remarkable rapprochement between the two Aegean neighbours. Cem was quickly followed by Kemal Dervis, the guarantor of Turkey’s international credit line. In the confusion following their ...”

“... has become so familiar, at least in the States, that it’s approaching the folkloric status of George Washington and the cherry tree. The brilliant Kenyan father meeting the mother at the University of Hawaii, where her father had moved for a job; Obama Senior going off to Harvard to take his doctorate and then continuing back to Kenya, leaving Barack and ...”

“... a Word.Rejoice! We are ruled thru’ infinityBy this highly dysfunctional Trinity!10 January. In George Lyttelton’s Commonplace Book it’s recorded that Yeats told Peter Warlock that after being invited to hear ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ (a solitary man’s expression of longing for still greater solitude) sung by a thousand Boy Scouts he set up a ...”

“... young Dennis Hopper and Harry Dean Stanton) in a boxing match against another prisoner, Dragline (George Kennedy), through his dogged willingness to offer up his body as a punchbag. It’s one of Newman’s best performances and was forced out of him by Rosenberg, who realised he had to ‘disturb him a little’. In one scene, he told him: ‘Shit, we’ve ...”

“... on an episode from an 1880 novel, The Grandissimes: A Story of Creole Life, by the American author George Washington Cable. One central character is an enslaved prince, Koanga, who is killed after cursing his enslavers and attempting to escape from them. But Delius and his librettist, Charles Francis Keary, changed Cable’s original in crucial ways, altering ...”

“... To suggest, as David Solkin does in his conclusion, that Joseph Wright’s An Experiment on the Bird in the Air Pump can ‘offer us a timely word of warning, before we join the chorus of acclamation for those market forces we see marching in apparent triumph across the world today’ is to take a Haydonesque leap into bathos. Solkin’s is not the only ...”

“... history is one of those heartwarming stories of literary virtue rewarded. Her first book, Poor George (1967), generated considerable critical excitement. Desperate Characters (1970) was described as ‘brilliant’ by Alfred Kazin and Irving Howe; Lionel Trilling called it ‘reserved and beautifully realised’. Six years later Karl Miller found The ...”

“... they hold as to the country’s standing in the United States actually survive the Presidency of George W. Bush, would do well to read Skidelsky’s account of Anglo-American negotiations during the Second World War. It would be wrong to think that failure, or relative failure, is the only theme of this volume. There is the constant pleasure of reading ...”

“... was not appreciated by those who wanted something more emotionally taxing from their composers. George Bernard Shaw was one such critic, though he found a more subtle explanation for his discontent than blaming Stanford for overhasty thought and cheap plagiarism. He noted in him ‘a record of fearful conflict between the aboriginal Celt and the ...”

“... memoirs, and almost completely messed it up. At one stage an experienced literary agent, George Greenfield, was brought in to advise, but found himself ‘constantly interrupted by Mrs Thatcher . . . who fixed him with a blank, self-absorbed stare. “The extent of her ill-conceived ignorance at that time was only matched by the brazen vigour with ...”

“... and always attentive to the chance that superstition might contain its portion of truth. George Santayana, James’s student and colleague, said ‘he gave a sincerely respectful hearing to sentimentalists, mystics, spiritualists, wizards, cranks, quacks, and imposters . . . Thus William James became the friend and helper of those ...”

“... Besides this main effort, a squadron of six warships and two supply vessels, led by Commodore George Anson, was to carry out a secret mission around Cape Horn, attacking Spanish ports on the Pacific coast and capturing one of their famed galleons full of silver en route from Mexico to the Philippines. From the outset, almost everything that could go ...”

“... own interest. Many a man, for instance, will envy Montgomerie’s sonnet to his lawyer: A Baxters bird, a bluiter beggar borne, Ane ill heud huirsone, lyk a barkit hyde, A saulles suinger, seuintie tymes mensuorne, A peltrie pultron poysond vp with pryde ... And a number of the poems have good bits, so that it is possible, by judicious quotation, to make ...”

“... an entire chapter to the ways in which the plays of the period – such as the anonymous comedy George a Greene, the Pinner of Wakefield (c.1590), Antony Munday’s two-part Downfall and Death of Robert Earl of Huntingdon (1598) and Jonson’s unfinished Sad Shepherd – remember or re-enact the paradigmatic story of Robin Hood. In ...”