“... in a marketplace. The central figure of the book is Meadow Mori, who is introduced to the reader by way of an internet essay, part of a series entitled ‘How I Began’ on a site devoted to Women and Film. After graduating in film studies Mori supposedly wrote to an obese ex-wunderkind of the screen, now reduced to voiceovers and chat show appearances ...”

“... designed to restore Goldsmith’s dignity, did not appear until 1837 and was quickly supplanted by two popularising and very popular works, John Forster’s The Life and Adventures of Oliver Goldsmith (1848) and Washington Irving’s Life of Oliver Goldsmith (1849). Forster and Irving built on Prior’s research to reinstate – affectionately, but still ...”

“... abbeys, and whose collections of rusty weaponry, stained glass and old ballads, provided new ways by which the past could be recovered – and also, of course, invented. Some of these antiquaries are familiar to architectural historians, others are known only to a few specialist curators of armour or to historians of ...”

“... mint cakes, asking if he fancied one. Often it is an apparently incidental thing that turns out to be a depth charge. The Dylan soundtrack reveals how much Stoppard is a child of his generation, how much the boy from Eastern Europe belongs to the West, but Lee excavates from it something of more particular interest, pointing out that the word ‘home’ rings ...”

“... than the Jews. The most famous justification for the practice appears in two letters written by Pope Gregory the Great at the end of the sixth century to Serenus, bishop of Marseille. Serenus had destroyed some narrative paintings (‘stories’) of ‘holy people’, apparently because they were being worshipped ...”

“... on the cover of this Library of America collection of her stories, plays and other writings is by Carl Van Vechten, and it is one of those images that seems to demonstrate the soul is real, like spirit photography. My study of Carson McCullers began when I was a teenager, as any study of her should. On one of our family outings to the bookstore, I picked ...”

“... for help she was told ‘Madam, there were no black people in England before 1945.’ In fact, as David Olusoga’s remarkable book shows, people racialised as black have been in Britain for more than two thousand years. During the third century, North African Roman soldiers formed part of the occupation of the British Isles: ‘Aurelian Moors’ were ...”

“... man and liberator of the slaves, has been the subject of more than 16,000 books, according to David S. Reynolds’s new biography, Abe. That’s around two a week, on average, since the end of the American Civil War. Almost every possible Lincoln can be found in the historical literature, including the moralist who ...”

“... it, I added the two letters at the end of the word, in tiny block capitals, subscript. Manhunt by itself looked a bit feeble, but ManhuntAA looked incredibly cool. Yes, it was a book I was writing, not a film, but why shouldn’t books carry censor’s certificates too? And it had to be an AA certificate, because that ...”

“... challenged Henry VIII’s break with Rome. Only one did so outspokenly – and he was rewarded by a martyr’s death. John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, was executed in June 1535 for refusing (like Thomas More) to take the oath of succession. He was prepared to swear to the succession itself, which he believed that King and nobles were entitled to ...”

“... looking foolish in public and feeling sorry for themselves in private – the present moment will be tinged with many ironies. Liberals who have made a life-work out of putting themselves in the other chap’s shoes will no doubt evince an imaginative sympathy for Mr Tebbit’s friends, now that the Eighties, so manifestly their own domain, are turning into ...”

“... its cues from Rousseau and Freud to urge ‘frankness as never before’: autobiography should be the scene of revelation, a public confessional, an equivalent, in book form, of the newspaper exposé that ‘tells all’. But all can never be told: one can never escape one’s life, one’s language, one’s cultural ...”

“... thirds of the 18th century. Starting with Hogarth, the first major native-born painter, they can be roughly divided into those who followed academic precepts, often slavishly but sometimes imaginatively (Reynolds, Wilson, Barry and West), and those whose paintings were, in important ways, anti-academic, or ‘English’: Hogarth himself, Zoffany, Wright of ...”

“... Facing a brazen engraving of the famously pugnacious 1941 Karsh photograph, surrounded by appropriate symbols or even original relics of Spitfires, Sten guns, Home Guard pikes and Montecristo cigars, listening to quadrophonic recordings of the major speeches in His own voice, peering into side-chapels dedicated to His companions ...”

“... achievement. Though he was never the kind of philosophical poet Coleridge asked him to be, Wordsworth’s subject was no less than the whole of human society; as with such holist contemporaries as Coleridge and Hegel, his views on different topics lead into each other, presenting comparable vocabularies and linked concerns whether his immediate ...”