“... Even her portraits gave her a Caucasian makeover, airbrushing racial distinctiveness – she may have had facial tattoos – to make her conform to English expectations. Her cultural rebirth was not so much a gesture of accord between Britain and the Indigenous people of Virginia as a symbol of conquest and dominion over the American wilderness and its ...”

“... where problems of crowding, poverty and racial tension are endemic, riots do not start. New York may not have found the preventive cure for rioting, but it was clear in those tumultuous long hot summers of the late Sixties that the City Government and the New York Police were doing something right. It is easy to forget that John Lindsay, still burdened with ...”

“... Sylvia Plath, who records being mesmerised, both by Hughes as a person and by his work. On 3 May 1956 she wrote to her mother to tell her that ‘Ted has written many virile, deep banging poems,’ and in her journal, describing their first meeting, she remembered: ‘And I was stamping and he was stamping on the floor, and then kissed me bang smash on ...”

“... unbearable to him, whereas the martyr gives up his most precious possession in the hope that good may flow from it. In Christian theology, what determines whether or not you can embrace death in this way is how you have lived. If you have failed in life to divest yourself for the sake of others, you will be trapped like William Golding’s Pincher Martin in a ...”

“... and cold and inconsiderate. One begins to see parallels with Lawrance Thompson’s quest for Robert Frost: as Thompson, at first a hero-worshipper, dredged deeper into the material that eventually became his big biography, the hero began more and more to take on the lineaments of a monster. When she set out on her quest for the truth, Polly already knew ...”

“... a bay), William Baffin (who became an island) and Vitus Bering (who became a strait). He describes Robert Peary claiming the North Pole for America, and how, to keep up the morale of his men, Richard Collinson erected a billiard table on the sea-ice of Cambridge Bay. The table was fashioned from snow blocks, the cushions from walrus skin stuffed with ...”

“... more often floury or waxy than glazed; the objects are solidly there, sparingly translucent. They may glow, they do not glitter. Matisse had to have the real thing – girl or oyster – in front of him when he painted. And it had to be fresh: for one still-life he renewed his oysters every day and had a boy on hand to water the fish for another. The results ...”

“... pregnant opening – ‘12 June. I’ve never known such a summer. A sultry heatwave since mid-May. All day a thick cloud of dust hangs unmoving over streets and market-places’ – reminds me irresistibly of another great beginning: ‘Ganz Europa leidet gegenwärtig unter dieser Hitze’ (‘All Europe is currently suffering in this heatwave’), from ...”

“... of 1988, which read the work as determined by personal feeling, and the more scholarly accounts of Robert Ackerman and Hugh Lloyd-Jones which located her ‘at the heart’ of the (so-called) Cambridge Ritualists. Reluctant to offer an alternative myth, yet anxious to avoid already trampled ground, Beard instead explores Harrison’s formative years in ...”

“... in short, a Britain which looks more like America. (Hill was an enthusiastic proponent of Sir Robert Montgomery’s scheme to establish a colony, ‘Azilia’, in South Carolina, on whose ‘sweet plains where all delights are sure’, in the words of his poem ‘The Western Paradise’, ‘Men can, by turns, be ev’ry thing, but poor.’) This view is ...”

“... he likened to a novel by Balzac. That was the last film Stroheim completed as a director. He may be better known as an actor (‘the man you love to hate’, La Grande Illusion, Sunset Boulevard), but in the history of film he made more of a mark as a director. It was his accumulation of detail that earned Stroheim a place in old film histories as the ...”

“... No Secrets, and Says He’ll Prove It’ – so ran the main headline in the New York Times on 18 May. The subject was Donald Trump’s supposed revelation of foreign intelligence assets when he met with Russian officials in the Oval Office. It isn’t yet clear if anything dangerous was done, but the US media were showcasing their heavy artillery with a leak ...”

“... which was ultimately, if not immediately, grounded in the supernatural. These may be the dichotomies one takes for granted, reinforced as they so often are with a wealth of anecdote. ‘Theology and Parsondom’ were, for T.H. Huxley, ‘the natural and irreconcilable enemies of science’. His professional rival Richard Owen, by ...”

“... Why … are people prepared to lay down their lives for their country?’ Some of the answers may lie in the enabling detachment of kinship emotion from its original sources. Such feelings can be strengthened, even as they are diffused or redeployed. Because this kind of siblinghood is ‘metaphorical’, it doesn’t follow that it’s weaker, or watered ...”