“... identified as causes of disease. Bad smells and visible grime were easier to point to. Long after John Snow’s demonstration that something waterborne would explain the distribution of cholera cases in the area served by the Broad Street pump (his plan of the area, mapping mortality, is on display) the theory that it was a miasma – infected air – that ...”

“... crucial date in the story of how colour entered the world of art photography is 1976, the year John Szarkowski, curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, organised an exhibition of William Eggleston’s colour prints. Many people were shocked: first because the leading museum of modern art was willing to exhibit colour ...”

“... of a head, the angle of a leg, or the loop of a skipping rope add movement. English painters like John Bratby and Jack Smith were drawing on similar subjects with a not dissimilar, calculated clumsiness that trades crispness for directness, as though seeking to match the thing drawn in the accent of the drawing. ‘Catterline in Winter’, c.1963. Her ...”

“... a family friend whom he didn’t like, out of obscurity into being the Blooms’ cleaner; he took down a pompous ex-friend from his plinth as assistant director of the National Library to being a nosey menace who passes in a second. To some artists, the world is quite absent until imagined, and Joyce thought it silly that a writer wouldn’t use what was ...”

“... gardening has been the fashion.There have been times, however, when London’s green tide was out. John Evelyn’s intentions in writing Sylva (‘A discourse of forest and the propagation of timber in his majesties dominions’), published in 1664, were practical. The book answered a request from the Commissioners of the Navy to the Royal Society for advice ...”

“... are note-like sketches – the one of hanged men, for example, or the drawings of the entourage of John VIII Palaeologus, the Byzantine Emperor, made when he was attending the Council of Ferrara in 1438 – but it is the worked-up studies which best meet Facio’s description: of a horse harness drawn as though to instruct a farrier, and the different ...”

“... The voice on the phone was terrified and tearful. ‘I’m in such trouble, such trouble.’ It took me quite a while to get Josephine to say what had happened. She is the 18-year-old daughter of my domestic servant here in Johannesburg. Josephine, like her two sisters, is a boarder at a school near Pietersburg, 350 kilometres away ...”

“... was a fixture of the Fulton Fish Market, subject of some of Mitchell’s best writing. Mitchell took all these projects seriously for a time. But the project that was connected most closely to his name during his final decades was a book variously described as a memoir of growing up in North Carolina, a small piece of which he actually wrote; or a book ...”

“... simply torture their children. In later life Jones went to bed in full make-up and hair – it took four hours every day – just in case she was taken ill in the night and had to go to hospital. Stephen Sondheim remembers seeing her in Ravello during the shooting of John Huston’s madcap movie Beat the Devil. ‘I ...”

“... he knew that would wreck his Presidential hopes as it had wrecked Russell’s. Until LBJ took the job, the Democratic Leader in the Senate was a figure of fun, the butt of jokes about impotence and irrelevance. The Leader had no way of making senators vote the way he wanted and nobody was keen to have the job. To do it properly you had to spend more ...”

“... to spy on their neighbours to fight terrorism), but found the country not yet ready for it. So he took the project underground and executed it in secret. Cheney issued the orders, his lawyer David Addington drew up the rationale, and Hayden at NSA made the practical arrangements. Eventually Cheney would appoint Hayden director of the CIA. Americans caught our ...”

“... archivally heroic and at times scandalmongering book traces the way the legendary Master took hold of the public imagination while stifling the real James. Monopolising the Master opens with James’s own efforts to determine his posthumous reputation but quickly locks focus on the biographer Leon Edel’s alliance with James’s nephew Harry, which ...”

“... gaze flitted between Marie-José and Paz and her husband.The next encounter was definitive. It took place by chance in Paris, on the afternoon of 28 June 1964. Paz describes it in Viento Entero. In Paul Blackburn’s translation:              The fallen birdbetween rue Montalembert and rue de Bacis a girl              held ...”

“... reader, Simone de Beauvoir once wrote, has to be willing to follow the writer on her adventure. I took her advice, cleared my mind and tried to follow Cristina Campo on her journey. I was in for a shock: in these essays, Campo turned out to be a reactionary elitist. A dogmatic Catholic who hated the liberal reforms of Vatican II, a militant activist for the ...”

“... human context, in the midst of a like-minded radical intelligentsia: William Frend, George Dyer, John Thelwall, Basil Montagu, John Tweddell, Felix Vaughan, James Losh, Joseph Fawcett. Roe’s research has been strenuous, his attention to detail earnest, and his book will be useful. But it will not be quite as useful as ...”