“... form of ‘stories’. Thus it is clear that Spender was himself highly entertained by what the painter William Coldstream describes in his diary as a ‘slightly sticky’ party given by Benjamin Britten in Hallam Street. Present as well as the Coldstreams, and Spender and his then wife Inez, were Auden and Isherwood, their new boyfriends, and Peter Pears ...”

“... That group was the aristocracy of English artists and intellectuals. Her great-uncle was the painter Rudolph Lehmann, friend of Robert Browning and George Eliot. Her father, R.C. Lehmann, was a well-known writer and man of letters. Of her siblings, a younger sister is Beatrix Lehmann, the actress, her younger brother ...”

“... crossed Newfoundland, 33 hours before he landed in Paris. The French President decorated him; King George V received him at Buckingham Palace; President Coolidge sent a cruiser and an admiral to bring him home. In Chesapeake Bay, Mr Kennedy tells us, the cruiser was met by four destroyers, two army dirigibles and a fly-past from all three services. Ashore in ...”

“... in a prison camp (as Márquez might have it), but sleight of hand. Myth has been killed off, the painter Sada announces, remembering that a snow-white whale appeared in the port when he was a child, only to get shot. ‘“Ready! Aim! Fire! Destroy the miracle!” That’s right. He’d shout there were no sirens left in Galicia because we’d eaten them ...”

“... the war felt like before the victory of the Allies at El Alamein. In his Levant Journal the poet George Seferis, who was attached to the Greek government in exile in Cairo after Greece had capitulated, recalls grim scenes of panic and disorder as the British, fearing imminent defeat and a German invasion, evacuated thousands of civilians across the border to ...”

“... a dull farmhouse. Genuine remnants of Leptis Magna were erected at Virginia Water, to please George IV. The divide between antiquity and artifice, ancient and modern, was becoming increasingly blurred. Literary Romanticism, like the Picturesque, borrowed its tone of mystery from the ramshackle ruins of Gothic religious establishments. With a bit of ...”

“... jewel didn’t belong in a shabby listings rag and they ought to start a proper literary magazine. George Plimpton, a childhood friend of Matthiessen’s, was brought on as managing editor, and Plimpton enlisted Donald Hall to solicit the poems. They did a lot of drinking together and decided not to publish criticism, placing the emphasis on short ...”

“... from England and Scotland. Even the most sophisticated of travellers might be homesick and the painter Thomas Jones was one of those who found that the ‘increasing phantom’ of loneliness disappeared at the inn ‘where we lived in the English fashion’. In time the family owned two more inns in Florence and their visitors’ books reflect the social ...”

“... known for the photographic work he had published in Europe. In Paris he met Meissonier, the painter most famous for his scrupulous realism. He was expert in large, precisely researched military scenes, many of them historical, where animals and men appeared in correct gear and posture, and period portraits were deftly inserted. His research included the ...”

“... that, there is something very deep that is yet to be appreciated by Westerners.’ George Harrison and Ravi Shankar at the Royal Albert Hall on 23 September 1974. Images of Shankar – sitting cross-legged on a carpet, playing his sitar – have become synonymous with Indian classical music, yet when his story is told it too often focuses on ...”

“... with republicanism, and was as critical of the ‘principles and practice’ of the leading painter of the French Revolution, Jacques-Louis David, as he was of Repton and Brown. In discussions of painting Knight professed himself a colourist. He disliked the contemporary fashions for heroic subjects, statuesque figures, the rigidities of planar ...”

“... Miller is clearly in pursuit of genealogy, for example, when she claims that the Late Victorian ‘George Egerton’ (Mary Chavelita Dunne), the Edwardian May Sinclair and the Modernist Virginia Woolf all strove ‘to find a new kind of realism – one which would allow them to move behind the surface of external reality to reveal the truth of modern women’s ...”

“... On the evening of 26 April 1937, George Lowther Steer, a correspondent for the Times, was having dinner with other reporters at the Torrontegui Hotel in Bilbao. Sometime after nine, a distraught Basque official rushed into the dining-room: ‘Guernica is destroyed,’ he told them. The town was still burning when the journalists got there ...”

“... complements her book The ‘Shepheards Nation’, in which she shows Spenser’s literary heirs George Wither, William Browne and the MP Christopher Brooke co-ordinating political with poetic pressure on the Crown at moments of political turmoil in the 1620s. Or there is 1667, when Marvell’s Last Instructions to a ...”

“... a routine by William Burroughs. The paper Caesarean section was performed blind by the self-taught painter-poet Brion Gysin. While cutting mounts for a drawing, he sliced through several layers of newsprint beneath the card. Promoting the implications of his accident to the other inmates at 9 rue Gît-le-Coeur, he described the way he ‘picked up the raw ...”