“... less in the control of a single family: the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), created and run by William Paley; Time Inc, including Life, owned by Henry Luce; the Washington Post and Newsweek, run by Philip and then by Kay Graham; and the Chandler family’s Los Angeles Times. Beginning in the Thirties with President Roosevelt, who, more than any President ...”

“... tactless proposal, as it was held to be, to Louisa, Lady Ashburton.4 Virginia Surtees, following William Whitla, has argued that it was Lady Ashburton who proposed to Browning, and now she has discovered what amounts to conclusive proof that it was so. But if one instance of ‘naughtiness’ is disposed of, what of the other? That Mrs Howard is a ...”

“... I stumbled on an eerie flock of birds: chaffinches – brilliant dabs of green, orange, blue and white – with their beaks pushed into the soil; woodpigeons, their wings and tails spread like fans for flight, a froth of spittle at each open mouth; greenfinches and reed buntings, tree sparrows and yellowhammers, hundreds of them, all dead, the last gleam ...”

“... The American writer, William Finnegan, went to Mozambique in 1988. He had already written for the New Yorker about the war and Pretoria’s support for Renamo (Resistência Nacional Moçambicana), the anti-government insurgency. ‘The brisk self-assurance of that piece now makes me wince,’ he says in the preface to his careful and informative book ...”

“... slightly sunk in the middle and raised over the eyes. He is rather bald, but what hair he has is white and frizzy.’ That was written in 1665; in the black and white chalk drawing he made a decade later he still resembles exactly that description. The first picture of Hockney, in order of appearance, is a self-portrait ...”

“... to ‘discover’ black modernism. Paris wasn’t without racism, of course. Chester Himes and his white girlfriend were kicked out of their hotel after white American guests complained about the presence of an interracial couple. But, as the novelist William Gardner Smith explains in a ...”

“... The autobiographical fragment by Allon White entitled ‘Too close to the bone’, which was published in 1989 in the London Review of Books, has just been republished by the LRB, this time in book form.* Allon taught at the University of Sussex until he died in 1988 at the age of 37. He was the author of The Uses of Obscurity and (with Peter Stallybrass) The Politics and Poetics of Transgression ...”

“... In 1919, after prolonged study, the Harvard ethologist William Morton Wheeler pronounced the male wasp ‘an etiological nonentity’. An animal behaviourist had scrutinised the male wasp and found – no behaviour. We can well imagine the male wasp’s response to such a verdict: his initial shock and hurt; his descent into a period of depressed introspection; his eventual decision to improve his act ...”

“... are passages of wiry drawing in some plates – for example, the figure of Pitt as Death and the white horse which carries him in Presages of the Millennium – which only the most vigorous and controlled pen drawing could match, and which only a master in either medium could achieve. Gillray’s first ambition was to be a reproductive engraver (Richard ...”

“... visible throughout Elizabethan culture. Night is conventionally regarded as ugly; Juliet the white girl is beautiful; the point of the remark is the incongruity of seeing someone so radiant against this sunless background. We should infer that Romeo considers the random Ethiope innately repulsive, unworthy of the bright jewel in his or her ear.This may ...”

“... warmed by the Moonies’ unconditional support for him during Watergate, invited Moon to the White House, where the two men prayed together. Nixon’s fall was a grievous blow to Moon, who immediately set out on a campaign of extreme right-wing agitation to reverse what he saw as the decline into leftism inaugurated by Watergate. The Moonie ...”

“... When, in the summer of 1898, at the age of 56, William James went to Berkeley, California to deliver a series of lectures on pragmatism, he could have used his own life to illustrate the immensely difficult but successful application of one of its tenets: that truth is best seen as ‘what it is better for us to believe’, not as ‘as an accurate representation of reality’, and that what is better for us to believe is what can be ascertained only in and through our actions, not by consultation with fixed ideas or traditions or, notably in his case, by family example ...”

“... artists to whom I feel most deeply connected. Longing powers my own art.In the second volume of William Feaver’s biography of Lucian Freud (Bloomsbury, £35), David Dawson, Lucian’s long-serving assistant, describes Susanna Chancellor, the woman who remained Lucian’s partner longer than anyone else, as ‘a proper woman, not one of these ...”

“... couples on the edge of acts of violence, can, even now, make the name Camden Town oppressive. William Rothenstein said that he had known many poor studios in Paris, but that Sickert’s ‘genius for discovering the dreariest house and the most forbidding rooms in which to work’ was still ‘a source of wonder and amusement’ to him. Harold Gilman’s ...”

“... be published, indeed she sensibly provided for it. ‘I love reading Letters myself,’ she told William Maxwell, her literary executor, ‘and I can imagine enjoying my own.’ She was born in 1893, an only child. Her father was a Harrow master, who, in a way not very complimentary to his profession (but quite right for STW), never sent her to school. She ...”