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“... what was not harmonious’. She also wrote that the 19th-century novel was ‘a Judaised novel: George Eliot and Dickens and Tolstoy were all touched by the Jewish covenant: they wrote of conduct and the consequences of conduct: they were concerned with a society of will and commandment’. Auden said that he had within him a ‘mad clergyman’, who often ...”

“... that the first Casaubon – Isaac – was an immensely learned Continental contemporary of Burton. George Eliot’s sad heaper-up of undigested matter could also be seen, then, as Burton minus the humour. To this day, European visitors to British universities sometimes confess themselves bewildered or repelled by the inclusion of jokes in papers read to ...”

“... to Fanny Burney. She was swept, as Second Keeper of the Robes, into the train of Queen Charlotte, George III’s wife, when she too was in her thirties and famous as the author of two bestsellers, Cecilia and her rumbustious, read-on first novel, Evelina, which Oxford has now reissued as a World’s Classics paperback. The potential for psychological delicacy ...”

“... no danger of suicide car bombs. A blue and white police vehicle hooted at a small child kicking a ball. Children often play in the alleyway behind the hotel – their favourite game, played with plastic Kalashnikovs, is Americans v. the resistance – but it had been a long time since I had seen any of them on the main road. By midday the Western television ...”

“... being what his contemporaries would have called a simpleton. He was sent to be tutored by the Rev. George Austen, father of Jane, but proved a slow learner and had a serious stammer. Jane was still to be born at the time he lived in her home, but she encountered Wallop at a ball in later life and thought him presentable ...”

“... depicted them as a literary fab foursome, with Knausgaard the cute Paul and Fosse the spiritual George.) Fosse did once dabble in painting, though his greater passion was for music (‘I came to writing from rock music. A kind of almost imperceptible transition, from the guitar to the typewriter’) and there’s a scene in Septology in which the teenage ...”

“... As soon as he was hired he destroyed his old clothes: according to Latour he ‘rolled them into a ball, sat on them, dragged them across the floor, trod on them and drenched them with all kinds of liquid until he’d turned them into complete rags’. Then he bought himself a top hat, Windsor tie and frock coat, initiating himself into dandyism.Satie spent ...”

“... director in Mel Brooks’s The Producers, who makes his appearance bare-shouldered and in a heavy ball gown. 7 March. Our pillar box is now emptied at 9 a.m. not by the Royal Mail van but by a minibus marked Portobello Car and Van Hire. 10 March. To Bradford for the provincial premiere of The Madness of King George. The ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... be seen with a club in his hand – but Obama was not most presidents. His immediate predecessor, George W. Bush, loved the game but felt he ought to give it up after 9/11, in case it seemed frivolous to be on the golf course when he was sending soldiers into battle. Obama was not so self-denying. Ben Rhodes describes what happened when news came through in ...”

“... businessman, the boxer in the boardroom. (A high-profile exemplar of this style was the magnate, George Walker; once, according to James Morton, an ‘ally’ of Billy Hill and Eddie Chapman, later a frequently puffed adornment of the Thatcherite open market culture.) There is nothing new in the concept, quality tailoring bonded over primal naughtiness. It ...”

“... with local fevers. And out of those tossings and turnings a strange and clear prosody was born. George Plimpton has tripped on a handy way of telling the story of a life, so long as that life happens to be one like Truman Capote’s. In place of an account shaped by Plimpton’s sentences, what we have is a birth-to-death narrative made up of the voices of ...”

“... catalogue of 1796, calls it Study of a Black Man’s Head, and the painting’s first owner, Sir George Beaumont, who had known both Johnson and Reynolds, asserted that it was a portrait of Reynolds’s black servant. There are a number of later copies or versions of the painting, one attributed to Reynolds’s pupil and amanuensis, James Northcote. These ...”

“... though this was eventually slimmed down to a canon of 52 poets from Abraham Cowley (1618-67) to George Lyttleton (1709-73). Johnson, by then 68 and the grand old man of English letters, was asked, for a modest fee of 200 guineas (‘no man but a blockhead’ etc), to add value and authority to the enterprise by providing a short preface to each poet’s ...”

“... George Osborne​ gets booed at the London Olympics. Suella Braverman cracks gags during her visit to a half-built asylum detention centre in Rwanda. Boris Johnson is illegally presented with a birthday cake. A Tory staffer throws up as the exit poll drops. David Cameron keeps his bladder full all night to achieve maximum focus during EU negotiations ...”