“... Academician Dominic Serres’s children, two sons and four daughters, became exhibiting artists. Philip Reinagle trained both his sons and four of his daughters: Charlotte, Fanny, Harriet and Oriana Georgiana. (The painter and diarist Joseph Farington encountered ‘two or three’ of the Reinagle sisters in 1807 and noted their unsentimental approach to ...”

“... publish his poems, but broke down again and failed to get a degree. Student friends, who included Philip Hobsbaum and Ted Hughes, registered that Redgrove was impressively unusual. Hobsbaum thought he bore ‘a resemblance to Frankenstein’s monster, only better dressed’. Harry Guest recalls him carrying ‘a swordstick with him’ – like a Mr Hyde ...”

“... direct insult to the British flag’. The Admiralty issued a worldwide alert, and the War Office drew up strategic plans. London and Liverpool erupted in pro-Confederate demonstrations; street-corner salesmen hawked rebel banners while Adams fretted ineffectually and Moran ground his teeth. In Washington, at a ball for the Portuguese minister, Seward warned ...”

“... who composed its city comedy-like scenes – and because the text we have is unfinished. Hytner drew in popular unrest of the sort shown in the Jack Cade scenes of Henry VI Part II and by the mob in Julius Caesar. To make Timon of Athens a play for today is to cut through a lot of differences between Jacobean and modern London. Again, this is ...”

“... Ministry of Agriculture. What is rather surprising is that at least three of the characters – Philip Schnäbele, Jean-Yves Fréhaut and Catherine Lechardoy – actually exist, and have simply been plonked into the book. Understandably, they took it badly: they are represented, like many characters in Houellebecq’s novels, as pointless and ...”

“... of the abbeys violently desecrated and looted’. She is less interested in the applause this drew from militant, godly Scots, and in the vandalism associated with the Reformation of 1560 and later regretted by voices in the Kirk. Distancing herself from the notion that Protestantism brought unionism to Scotland, she offers no analysis of the way the ...”

“... and unconvinced, marred in their judgments by a ‘fatal distaste for self-criticism’, as Philip Martin puts it. In J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, the dodgy English professor David Lurie’s seduction of his student is bound up with his admiration for Byron’s poetry, Lara in particular.It’s easy to forget, in this context, that Byron was the same poet ...”

“... Life of an American Poet (1977), James Atlas describes the eleven-part code of conduct Schwartz drew up for himself and distributed among his fellow students. They were to read a chapter from Aristotle’s Logic every day, as well as half an hour of Spinoza; to ‘use words as translations of reality, not as cheap band music’; to listen to Bach and avoid ...”

“... and refers to its context elsewhere, in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ and in ‘Philip Massinger’. He would admire the directness of the language used to affirm Beatrice-Joanna’s guilt, and the last line, with its yoking together of ‘sewer’ and ‘distinction’, the nasty particularity of the one confronted by the grand abstraction ...”

“... or politics either, even if they seem the only alternatives on offer: you can see why critics drew very different morals from poems articulating such a complicated frame of mind.The most famous piece of modern writing about Kathleen Ni Houlihan, the embodiment of Mother Ireland, is a play written in 1902 by Yeats and Lady Gregory in which she turns up, a ...”

“... Spain produced at the court of Alfonso X. (An official attempt to canonise Rodrigo, initiated by Philip II in 1554, failed.) In the street theatre of the 17th century, El Cid appeared as Christ, with his widow, Jimena, as his patient bride, representing all who await his second coming.By the time Spain could be spoken of as a modern nation, Rodrigo Díaz had ...”

“... well.The well-made, articulate manner of the early verse is often associated with the tutelage of Philip Hobsbaum, who ran a writers’ workshop in Belfast during the Sixties. Though the Group was less decisive in creating an Ulster Renaissance than some text-books claim, Heaney felt its effects for longer than is generally realised. Hobsbaum has even said ...”

“... the Oval Office, Condoleezza Rice among them. There was a conversation about Iraq. As the meeting drew to a close, Garner said to Bush: ‘The one thing I’ll tell you, I’ve had three weeks to work with Ambassador Bremer and he’s one of the hardest working men I’ve ever seen. He’s a very bright guy. He’s articulate and he’ll get the job done. You ...”

“... guiding it under her dress, then through a pocket-like flap. Her skin under his palm. Revolted, he drew back. David is about six years old here, and as he grows older his confused sexual knowledge gets bound up with other mysteries. Learning Hebrew from the surly neighbourhood rabbi, he becomes obsessed with the burning coal touched to Isaiah’s lips by an ...”

“... digest of changes in Western monetary policy over the last few centuries by the Economist writer Philip Coggan, and in Debt: The First 5000 Years by the anthropologist and activist David Graeber, which situates the same stretch of modern history within the vast tidal shifts, across five millennia of Eurasian history, between monetary regimes founded on ...”