“... and Vermeer the artist is an unusual tact. Here, the absence of any distinctive personal detail may constitute the evidence. Chevalier and Bailey agree that the Protestant-born Vermeer must have been a very diplomatic personality to share a house with his Catholic mother-in-law, a tough old widow who was estranged from her son and refused at first to ...”

“... 1931, or that Dudley Carew’s memoir, The House Is Gone, was published in 1949 by the firm of Robert Hale? Who is Dudley Carew anyway, and where does Taylor lay his hands on these remarkably recondite texts? Why should one begin a paragraph with the sentence, ‘After publishing his first novel, A Day in Summer (1963), J.L. Carr gave up his job as a ...”

“... while the BP oil spill, and the subsequent poisoning of Gulf waters with dispersant chemicals, may surpass Katrina in both economic damage and loss of human life. Disaster is part of the character of the city: not just the trauma of past cataclysms, but the fear of what will come next, and how soon. In New Orleans’s first hundred years, the period ...”

“... his celebrated warning that ‘the popular press is drinking in the last chance saloon.’ Mellor may have meant what he said, but he was certainly not speaking for the rest of the Government. As far as the majority of his colleagues were concerned the newspapers had not even walked through the saloon’s swing doors, and Calcutt was just a device to quell ...”

“... at the church court in Chichester. ‘Twenty shillings,’ he answered. He had been called by one Robert Constable to support a case for defamation against Stephen Pentecost. Pentecost’s witnesses said Tanner couldn’t be trusted: he was ‘a poore needy fellow’ with ‘a little cottage of his owne to dwell in … and noe other meanes to live’. One ...”

“... a Jesuit boarding school in Belgium where he mixed with English students: his lifelong Anglophilia may have begun there. In Paris he found success and social connections. He was trained by former students of Ingres along with Degas, who became a close friend, and met Whistler while copying an Ingres at the Musée du Luxembourg. Portraits of high society and ...”

“... of myself as white. In an era in which many people lament the tyranny of identity politics, it may seem healthy that the state should discourage racial or ethnic identification.Yet since returning to France twenty years later, I have become disillusioned with French pseudo-universalism. Official colour blindness did not prevent the National Rally, a party ...”

“... and other detachable body parts left dripping in gore around the house. A variety of situations may propel such fury. In Euripides’ Electra, Western civilisation’s mythic prototype for female-on-female mayhem, the rebel is an Outraged Daughter and the boss lady her Wicked Old Mother: Clytemnestra’s doom is sealed when she puts her sex life ahead of ...”

“... overlapped, as a glance at the careers of Ben Jonson or Fulke Greville or Samuel Daniel or Thomas May reminds us. Hayward’s book was a work to tempt a dramatist. Manning, its editor, who has no case to make about the connection between the book and the stage, nevertheless remarks on the ‘dramatic architecture’ of the book, on Hayward’s ‘inclination ...”

“... would be an armed response to Isis). No wonder she’s begun attracting admiring glances from Robert Kagan, Max Boot and other neoconservative ideologues. Like them, she’s given to soaring abstractions about the inevitable spread of democracy but is also careful to point out that it’s sometimes necessary to use force in the service of global ...”

“... further back still, in the dark plans of Apollo, god of light, and the will of Zeus, ‘whoever he may be’, the god who killed and usurped his own father? The play’s riddling language hints at the way one word, phrase, action or body can turn into another, often at a terrible price. The death of Iphigenia becomes the death of Agamemnon. More broadly, in ...”

“... his writing because his life was so full of confinement? His earliest surviving letter, written in May 1796 when he was 21, is addressed to an important friend and contains some surprising information: ‘Coleridge, I know not what suffering scenes you have gone through at Bristol, – my life has been somewhat diversified of late. The 6 weeks that finished ...”

“... Notes for Joyce (1974, revised and republished in 1988 as Ulysses Annotated by Don Gifford with Robert J. Seidman). It shows Joyce as both systematic in his approach to fact and at times struggling, and often failing, in his effort to avoid error. And it makes clear that Ulysses has a mundane source book – Thom’s Directory – to match The Odyssey, its ...”

“... has himself made a film about Hitler. ‘What was evil a few years ago and now seems undangerous may be evil again in another few ...”

“... a point. For instance, she privately draws doom-ridden conclusions from her supposed descent from Robert FitzRoy, who committed suicide, like his uncle Castlereagh, and like her father, who wasn’t married to her mother, but left her his name – which he didn’t spell in the supposedly ancestral fashion with a capital in the middle. That spelling Charlotte ...”