“... far from parochial in its range of reference: there was nothing in the least provincial about this short piece by a Liverpool-educated Manxman who taught at Newcastle. And I knew that music had played second fiddle only to literature in Frank’s life, being a subject about which he was genuinely learned as well as an experience to which he was reticently ...”

“... fiction, but in several passages Ricks nearly forgets Beckett, and fixes his attention on Philip Larkin, Hardy, Swift, Coleridge, Sydney Smith, Christina Rossetti or another. I can’t believe that he chose to deliver these Clarendon Lectures as a hodge-podge. It is more probable that he observed the impressionism that Beckett ascribed to ...”

“... The life of the patriarch, George Washington, father of the like-named painter and as short-lived as his successors (1832-73), is little documented: he was a Baltimore railway engineer who emigrated to St Petersburg to work there; he died from heart failure on a visit to London two months before the birth of his only son. Motion writes: ‘Like ...”

“... to America, which has been fashionable ever since Stephen Spender’s Love-Hate Relations. Philip Toynbee, in the Observer, came right out with it: ‘by now it is hard to see any reason why an American writer or artist should wish to settle either in Paris or London.’ Then, of course, it was another matter. James, Whistler, Sargent, Mark Twain, Bret ...”

“... of royal authority was firmly established. Small wonder that Shakespeare confined him to a short sequence of dreary rhyming couplets at the end of his Wars of the Roses tetralogy: while Henry VII may have been as murderous as Richard III, he was nothing like as charming. Francis Bacon was ready to praise Henry’s politic wisdom in the 1622 biography ...”

“... of herself’. Or, musing on her marriage to Charles and the new obsession with her stepson Philip: ‘She wished passionately that she could be the author of her own life, go back fifteen years and cross out Charles. No, not cross him out; she was very fond of Charles; just marry his son instead of him.’ Sylvie has a ‘marvellously simple’ cure ...”

“... must be to the social historian with an eye for the vagaries of upper-class behaviour. The editor, Philip Ziegler, tells us that the King (George V) felt that an extended imperial tour by his first-born would not only strengthen ties of friendship but weaken the infatuation felt by his son for Mrs Dudley Ward. This cure for love called for the services of the ...”

“... go through that again.’ In his Passchendaele, which marks the 70th anniversary of that occasion, Philip Warner argues that the worst feature of the battle was that it so ‘disheartened the democracies’ that they ‘became less willing to preserve peace by preparing for war’. Yet in the military context of the day the attempt to enlarge the Ypres Salient ...”

“... experience and hostile to the memory of working with him that he still refuses to comment on their short-lived joint practice. The creation of James Stirling, world-class architect, the man who as much as Philip Johnson or Arata Isosaki invented the ‘signature building’ and who travelled the rewarding circuit of ...”

“... New York City Police Department brochure entitled The 13 Most Wanted: Warhol conceived a series of short portrait films to be called The 13 Most Beautiful Boys. (The same brochure formed the basis for the commissioned mural that would emblazon the exterior of the New York State Pavilion at the 1964 World’s Fair.) Later, Warhol added The 13 Most Beautiful ...”

“... Jones, John Updike, Saul Bellow, Gore Vidal, J.D. Salinger, Joseph Heller, the recently retired Philip Roth), whose ghostly father and bearded Neptune disturbing the liquor cabinet deep into the night was Ernest Hemingway. Even those least influenced by Hemingway’s style couldn’t fail to register the impact of his hold on America’s consciousness: he ...”

“... fading in silence.’ There is the imagery of human actions and mannerisms. From ‘Comet’, a short story, the characterisation of desire: ‘He could have licked her palms like a calf does salt.’ From the same story: ‘He was mannerly and elegant, his head held back a bit as he talked, as though you were a menu.’ From Light Years, a young girl ...”

“... Patrick Hamilton is remembered today, if at all, for the short pre-war novel Hangover Square, and the stage thrillers Rope and Gaslight. They are good of their kind, but they lack the feel of involuntary masterpieces which still attends their up till now vanished predecessor – the trilogy of novels brought together in 1935 as Twenty Thousand Streets under the Sky ...”

“... man’s laws, by which she shall not be triedAt the last day? Will it then boot theeTo say a Philip, or a Gregory,A Harry, or a Martin taught thee this?(‘Philip’ is Philip II of Spain, ‘Gregory’ the pope, ‘Harry’ the Tudor king whose marital woes precipitated England’s ...”

“... been told. (Sadie Thompson, an American call-girl, appeared – name, fat legs and all – in the short story ‘Rain’.) It was a habit which left a ‘trail of angry people’. Maugham was born in 1874 in Paris, the youngest of four boys, to an English solicitor who looked after the affairs of the British expat community. His mother, remembered as a model ...”