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“... from Downing College.) Warner had a hand in Powys’s rise to fame, having recommended him to David Garnett, another fantasist, whose Lady into Fox had been a great success in 1922. There seems to have been a market in those years for a peculiarly English brand of fantasy, but any imputation of parochialism must fail: Garnett was a man of wide ...”

“... end. In some cases, the analogy with slavery continued, and they ran away from their masters, even wearing iron collars. The book includes pages of advertisements for these breakers of contracts, and the descriptions remind us how common then were visible physical defects, pock marks, scars, stiff joints, brand marks, ill-healed fractures. In the middle ...”

“... Chekhov’s irony is often savage, modern irony is often merely all-nullifying. It says much for David Bezmozgis’s considerable talents that his apparently skinny, crafty, ironic stories, narrated entirely in the first person in simple, unmetaphorical prose, and fond of abrupt closures, should seem to dip so obviously into the common pool and yet avoid, on ...”

“... child growing up in Brooklyn and the Lower East Side a few years before the First World War. David Schearl, the protagonist, lives in terror of his father, an implacably resentful man called Albert, who boils with rage every evening while recounting real or imagined workplace slights: ‘They look at me crookedly, with mockery in their eyes! How much can ...”

“... answer. 4 February. More senior moments. I can’t find my pullover and don’t like the one I’m wearing because it has several moth holes. ‘I had another pullover,’ I say to R. ‘I was wearing it this morning.’ ‘You still are. You’ve put the other one on top of it.’ Bike over to Gloucester Crescent and leave ...”

“... and Conflict, edits papers given at the third Centre for Environmental Studies Conference in 1979, David Donnison reflects on his time as Chairman of the Supplementary Benefits Commission in The Politics of Poverty, and Susanne MacGregor provides the best of the bunch with her brilliantly incisive analysis of The Politics of Poverty in the welfare state. It is ...”

“... and with more wit than sense.’ The actor offers no comment, but by now he doesn’t need to. David Gates, the creator of these connoisseurs of disappointment and self-sabotage, published his first novel, Jernigan, in 1991. Joseph Heller called it a ‘sizzler’ and Michiko Kakutani announced in the New York Times that Gates had ‘established himself as ...”

“... of August, in the loveliest of all English cathedrals, ‘the church of St Andrew in Wells’, ‘wearing in his wand a piece of paper spread abroad containing in great text [very large letters] these words’:         CHARLTON THOMAS ODAM, FOR INCEST WITH   AUCHARETT WHITE HIS WIVES         DAUGHTER Odam had been reported to the church ...”

“... main London dealer and worked with both Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst. Brausen asked the young David Sylvester to write something for the catalogue. His response remains acute: Richier, he declared, asks ‘not only how much damage the human body can endure and still remain human, but also how far the human body can be twisted into the shape of sub-human ...”

“... genre painting, rather than the austere classical models emulated by contemporaries such as David or Ingres. In his crowd paintings Boilly subjects the world of early 19th-century Paris to meticulous scrutiny. An old man lights another’s pipe from his own. A drunk pisses against a wall. Dogs bark and children gape. A pair of hands grip the reins of a ...”

“... are often but not always wrong. During Hollywood’s great period the good ones (Irving Thalberg, David Selznick, Darryl Zanuck) knew how to protect and indulge creative talent, but they also knew when to cut it off at the pass. One thing is well known to the modern producer: when a writer/director gets into his messianic period, a period born of popular ...”

“... and folding thing for him, a codex. He could only have known scrolls, like the ones that toga-wearing actors consult with bogus assurance in plays set in classical times, as if what they were holding was some sort of Kindle-in-waiting. And in the 1960s anyone who studied ancient Greek for A-level, as I did (the language of Callimachus, after all), was ...”

“... can only see so far: the maps give you an idea of what happened further off towards the horizon.David Bomberg was a fire-watcher in Kensington for much of the war, and was inspired by Piranesi’s etchings of the ruins of ancient Rome as he set about his charcoal drawings of London in 1944 and 1945. Nothing came of the topographical book he hoped to publish ...”

“... probably the result of a botched forceps delivery. As soon as she was old enough, she started wearing an iron splint. Every year she had to be fitted with a new splint at a clinic where three nurses broke the adhesions in her elbow by pulling hard. ‘The upside,’ she wrote, ‘was that I now have a very high pain threshold.’ Her parents’ marriage ...”

“... Napoleon than for any other figure except Jesus Christ. Others expressed hope for his return by wearing violets in their lapels – the flower comes out, as Napoleon came back, in March. His name and image remained important to underground movements and, in the immediate aftermath of the Hundred Days, attempts by the new Bourbon government to punish ...”