“... to carry important meaning in Doctorow’s narratives; in Loon Lake the vagrant hero was given Joseph Conrad’s Polish name; in the more autobiographical World’s Fair the author’s own name was used. Here the hero-narrator is called Billy Bathgate. The allusion is not to the unlovely Scottish mining town but to Bathgate Avenue in Doctorow’s native ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... ejaculation, it had to be negotiated between the two spouses, and must have involved a frank discussion of body parts. The use of the various barrier devices available, of which the condom was only one, also involved verbal negotiations between sex partners, so that on these occasions practical necessity must have overridden prudery. Mason argues ...”

“... of Anglo-American liberal imperialism occasionally berate his prejudices. Historians such as Frank Prochaska and Hugh Tulloch have portrayed him as a believer in the Anglo-Saxon racial mission. In truth, no one has pushed these partisan readings very far, because Bryce was too fastidious a writer to scatter wild generalisations through his writing. On ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... are eventually ‘ready to tear their own heads off rather than face another round of full and frank discussion’. In another, he has his great uncle in conversation with an Egyptian holy man, who persuasively claims that ancient Egypt had not only been culturally prior to Europe but greater than anything that had ever existed there. Reiner Reineck, by ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”