“... sky behind him, a painting long believed to be a portrait of Dr Johnson’s beloved black servant, Frank Barber. Houdon’s radiant patinated plaster head of a black woman of 1781, probably made in connection with a fountain group for an aristocrat’s garden, is another. Above all, there is the Portrait d’une Négresse exhibited at the Paris salon in 1800 ...”

“... for the Court’s decision in the Brown v. Topeka case was quite genuine, as he showed in his frank discussion of it in one of the letters which he used to write to his boyhood friend Swede Hazlett and which have been collected by Robert Griffith: he just thought the Southern states should have plenty of time to adjust. Forbearance was stretched to the ...”

“... and overwritings which, while visually creating a symbol of aesthetic tussle not unlike a Frank Auerbach drawing and securing the myth of Beethoven as a heroically patient grappler with crude ideas, in strictly musical terms often amount to a radical recasting of the music, a decisive continuation of composition at ‘fair copy’ or autograph ...”

“... cosmic melancholy of the troubled prince than any other writer of the era. His much loved father, Joseph-François Baudelaire, died when he was only five, and for a blissful year or so he had his mother to himself. ‘I lived constantly through you, you were mine alone,’ he recalled in one of his many painfully needy and reproachful letters to her. ‘You ...”

“... sentimental novel The Adventures of David Simple (1744) and contributor to her brother Henry’s Joseph Andrews (1742). They had worked together before – Collier wrote a preface for the 1753 sequel to David Simple, and in 1749 they both produced critical responses to Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa. Published in three volumes and running to almost a ...”

“... under other names – whether as Flann O’Brien (‘As a lad I knew Ibsen … Swinburne and Joseph Conrad were also frequent visitors to my grandfather’s place … At dusk, Coleridge would sometimes look in on his way home for a final pipe, and more than once the burly shape of Lord Macaulay was known to grace the gathering’) or Myles na gCopaleen ...”

“... would be no Hamlet or Lear, no Vanya or James Tyrone. His one shot at Shakespeare was as Antony in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s film of Julius Caesar (1953), where he amazed many doubters and impressed John Gielgud (his Cassius), by handling the verse as easily as he had muttered and snarled in Streetcar and The Wild One. But he did make movies, like ...”

“... Shall​  we never again talk together in laconic?’ Joseph Addison once wrote to Jonathan Swift, by way of inviting him to dinner the next time he happened to be in London. It’s the kind of invitation that might well appeal to Helen DeWitt, an ardent admirer of 18th-century wits and philosophers, and a classicist whose erudition undoubtedly extends to a familiarity with the defining features of Spartan rhetoric (Laconia is the region of the south-eastern Peloponnese which includes the city of Sparta ...”

“... in 1945, ‘to end the war in plain clothes writing. I remember at the start of it writing to Frank Pakenham that its value to us would be to show us finally that we are not men of action. I took longer than him to learn it.’ Was this what led him to romanticise failure – the failure of Charles Ryder to get religion or to get Julia, the failure of Guy ...”

“... Casement, thinks that we should not – it took place on 3 January 1904 and lasted only one day. Joseph Conrad had met Casement first in 1889 or 1890 in the Congo, when Casement was working for the Congo Railway Company. ‘For some three weeks,’ Conrad wrote, he lived in the same room in the Matadi Station of the Belgian Société du Haut-Congo. He was ...”

“... state in neighbouring South Kasai. While Tshombe and Kalonji maintained cordial relations with Joseph Kasavubu’s national government, they resented the leftist prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, an outspoken critic of Belgian neocolonialism. The Katanga and South Kasai secessions – referred to by Western media as ‘the Congo Crisis’ – were funded by ...”

“... drove the Government to send for Lord Wilberforce to make peace for them. Interviewed by the BBC, Frank Chapple was asked whether he wasn’t ashamed of the misery his workers were causing. Not a bit of it, he said: here was a government which had told everyone to stand on their own two feet, and that was what his members were doing. Governments which left ...”

“... viable kingdom of the North between the Humber and the Forth-Clyde isthmus,’ the historian Frank Musgrove claimed in 1990. It wasn’t the best moment to use the present tense, even if there had been an upsurge in commentary on the ‘North-South divide’ over the previous decade. Tom Hazeldine suggests that the phrase ‘entered the political ...”

“... must be admitted, fogs are carried to excess. They have become the mere mannerism of a clique.’Joseph Conrad used fog judiciously but to fine effect when writing about London. The Secret Agent is infested with it. Corton suggests, plausibly this time, that ‘fog signifies the blurring of Verloc’s and Stevie’s moral perceptions and the confusion of ...”

“... for instance (from the Dardanelles to Dakar, to Cologne, to Italy’s underbelly, to the murder of Frank Thompson), or Spender’s lachrymose sense that his (exceedingly brief) Communism had threatened to destroy his individual identity. But fairly promptly the CIA would import such heavy weaponry as Lionel Trilling, with his banging declarations that Western ...”