“... with many names, different names for a familiar compound ghost.’ One of those names might be Walter Pater. In his essay on Coleridge, Pater referred to ‘that inexhaustible discontent, languor and homesickness . . . the chords of which ring all through our modern literature’. Eliot quoted those words in his essay on ‘Arnold and Pater’, only to ...”

“... in your hometown’. Stolarsky had idolised Bruno at school – he still calls him Flashman, after George MacDonald Fraser’s dashing anti-hero – and he and Tira seem immensely tickled to have run into him. Bruno suspects that they are swingers, and both hint repeatedly that there might be room in their open relationship for him. In his hour of need, they ...”

“... we may wonder whether many people recognised it at the time. Prettejohn comes to it by way of Walter Pater’s essay on Giorgione of the same period, in which Legros is mentioned. Pater has never had a more careful and sympathetic reader or one better able to demonstrate how subtle and radical his ideas of influence and cultural inheritance were. Noting ...”

“... in the decadent platform’); and ‘A Lost Masterpiece’, an essayistic work of fiction by George Egerton – the pen name of Mary Chavelita Dunne, winningly known to her friends as Chav – in which a writer’s sacred reveries are suddenly destroyed by a woman with big feet. All this was interspersed with arresting illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley ...”

“... levels in the exhibition, though it’s hard to define a pure mistake. At the innocentish end is George Romney’s pen and ink Study of the Conjuring of a Spirit from the Play ‘Henry VI’, to which the bookseller Walter Spencer added the initials ‘W.B.’ in the belief that it was by William Blake. Spencer was prone ...”

“... or translating Rimbaud. Meanwhile, pioneering scholars like Barbara Tuchman, Frank Manuel and George Whalley mined gold year after year from the lodes of ore in the libraries.The roots of this bookish postwar New York, as Denise Gigante shows in Book Madness, stretched back deep into the 19th century. Some of them also nourished Boston’s book culture ...”

“... stick. As for the exclusion of all signs of Land Art, the failure to put a photograph or two of Walter de Maria’s Lightning Field into an exhibition of the American art of our time is equivalent to not putting an engraving or two after the Sistine Chapel into an exhibition of the Italian art of its time. The presence of an illustrated essay on Land Art in ...”

“... than his revelation – in January 1990 – that in mid-March 1989, three months after Lockerbie, George Bush rang Margaret Thatcher to warn her to ‘cool it’ on the subject. On what seems to have been the very same day, perhaps a few hours earlier, Thatcher’s Secretary of State for Transport, Paul Channon, was the guest of five prominent political ...”

“... with Haig and Robertson that the war could only be won on the Western Front and those, like Lloyd George and Churchill, who believed in ‘knocking away the props’ – but between those who believed in a traditional British strategy of minimal military and maximal economic contribution, of harbouring economic strength in support of Continental allies who ...”

“... Coupole’. ‘Henry’s gravelly voice let everyone immediately know that he was an American,’ George Whitman, the owner of the Shakespeare Bookshop in Paris, recently recalled. He never turned into one of those phoney American artists around town. Henry was a native American first, although he considered American air-conditioning a nightmare. He never ...”

“... two novels with feminist themes under the pen name Henrie Waste (her full name was Henrietta Walter Stettheimer). Both were panned in the press. Bloemink portrays Ettie as envious and increasingly embittered, a conflicted steward of Florine’s legacy. She edited her sister’s diary with a heavy hand, removing passages she considered too damaging or ...”

“... than unites them. In the Renaissance they were barely separable. Writers – Sir Thomas More, Sir Walter Ralegh, Samuel Daniel, Ben Jonson, Thomas May, John Milton, Andrew Marvell and many more – moved between history and poetry or drama, finding in them complementary means of instilling virtue and wisdom and influencing events. History, which was seen as a ...”

“... the Art Nouveau designer resisted the effects of industry, even as he also sought, in the words of Walter Benjamin, ‘to win back its forms’ – modern concrete, cast iron and the like – ‘for art’. There is no such resistance in contemporary design: it delights in post-industrial technologies, and it is happy to sacrifice the semi-autonomy of art and ...”

“... it wouldn’t have noticeably dimmed the young man’s appeal. Before long the German poet Stefan George came on the scene – Hofmannsthal’s gay friend Leopold von Andrian described him as looking like ‘an ageing hermaphrodite’, though he was no more than a hatchet-faced 23 – and was even more smitten. A sort of – chaste? – German pendant to ...”

“... the treasure of health’, which drew on the work of the 15th-century alchemists Thomas Norton and George Ripley, who in turn were indebted to the formulations of Ramon Llull, a 13th-century Majorcan polymath. The key to alchemy was deep reading, between texts and across the ages. Keynes’s scrabbling about for Newton’s papers was as nothing compared to the ...”