“... not the hider, who is doing the counting. ‘Doesn’t it annoy you a little,’ Bishop asked Robert Lowell, ‘when people hand you back, like an obligation, flat statements of what you “meant”?’ Colm Tóibín avoids this temptation. On Elizabeth Bishop is an engaging introduction to her life and work, and also an essay on the importance of her ...”

“... plays a mill owner in Haiti who uses voodoo to control his black zombie workers, and to enslave a young white American woman who’s engaged to one of his neighbours. As Kyle William Bishop writes in American Zombie Gothic: The Rise and Fall (and Rise) of the Walking Dead in Popular Culture, ‘this germinal film presented audiences with the exoticism of the ...”

“... are unfamiliar, and their stories are fascinating. Stargardt reconstructs the experiences of the young photojournalist Liselotte Purper from her unpublished correspondence with her fiancé and later husband, Kurt Orgel. We first encounter her at the beginning of the war, nailing blackout paper to the windowframes of her apartment in Berlin, then scampering ...”

“... made evident by the rise of high-return auctions, the most infamous being the 1973 sale of the Robert and Ethel Scull collection, which centred on Pop. Enraged artists saw none of the profits (with Hirst, in this respect, there has been a complete turnabout). After the recessionary 1970s, the anti-regulatory policies of Reagan and Thatcher promoted a new ...”

“... Arthur Waugh likened the work of Eliot to the Spartan custom of exhibiting a drunken slave to show young men ‘the ignominious folly’ of debauchery. (Pound replied that he would like to make an anthology of the work of drunken helots or Heliots, if he could find enough of them.) One anonymous writer, here rescued from oblivion, divined that Eliot’s aim ...”

“... twenty years’ sobriety, your disease will be two decades more terminal. ‘Rust,’ as Neil Young (the alcoholic’s favourite balladeer) puts it, ‘never sleeps.’ The belief that they are victims of an illness allows recovering alcoholics to forgive themselves for the awful things done in drink. Few, by the end of their drinking careers, have not ...”

“... of its readers, there is nothing unusual in an ageing QC using his money and position to gain young admirers; nor about a gap between perceptions of the public and the private man. Yet, despite the excesses to which some barristers are prone, it is almost unknown for them to become notorious for their bacchanalian lifestyles. So why is it that George ...”

“... a piece of double-entry book-keeping of the soul, or as a spiritual equivalent to the microscope Robert Hooke was using in the 1660s to count the hairs on a flea’s leg. What makes Pepys matter as a writer is the fact that he is a man totting up his sins before God, and a man out to take sexual favours and greedily sum them up, and a man who works ...”

“... is no coincidence that travel writers on Central Asia – a list that would include the Etonians Robert Byron and Colin Thubron, the Marlburian Bruce Chatwin and the gentry Scot William Dalrymple – so often boast superior educations if not pedigrees. Aspects of Stewart’s response to Iraq show the influence of his earlier travels. His interest in the ...”

“... appeared, to unexpected public jubilance, in 1942. By then Wilson had joined the cohort of clever young men thrusting their way through wartime Whitehall, where he made a name for himself with his prodigious memory and command of statistics. After entering Parliament for Labour in 1945 and becoming the youngest cabinet minister in more than a century, Wilson ...”

“... was supported by Tailyour family connections determined to use their influence on behalf of the young man. His African ancestry had to be explicitly denied. Once in India James’s letters reveal the extent to which he had adopted a white colonial identity: he gives hostile accounts of the Indian ‘natives’ and complains bitterly about lack of ...”

“... cultural history of England over the second half of the 14th century. But our first glimpse of the young Chaucer is an amusing one. The son of an affluent London vintner, he was fortunate as a teenager to gain a place in the household of Elizabeth de Burgh, whose husband was Edward’s second surviving son. Aged about 15, Chaucer ‘steps off the page as a ...”

“... St Guinefort, patron saint for the protection of children. Many sainted characters dream of bliss: Robert Browne, an 18th-century astronomer, of the young Jesus getting into bed with him; St Catherine of Siena of marrying Jesus, who gives her his foreskin for a ring (the lack of self-awareness among our pre-Freudian ...”

“... marked ‘Kultur’ in one hand and a swooning, half-naked maiden in the other. The poster urged young Americans to ‘destroy this mad brute’.In wartime propaganda, as in the newly created ‘Western Civ’ surveys, civilisation was seen as the creation of Ancient Greece and Rome. ‘Plato to Nato’ courses may have introduced the mediating influence of ...”

“... to the possibility – and it shows up.’ Her poems first came to light when she sent them to Robert Hayden, the first African American poet laureate. She won a Discovery Award, which was presented at the 92nd Street Y, followed by a dinner in Claudette Colbert’s apartment. This prize led to the publication in 1969 of Good Times – the first of ...”