“... things – I mean the most delicious kinds of strawberry and raspberry tarts in the dead of winter; and always champagne’. (He didn’t mention the inadequate heating: Dolly Wilde, Oscar’s niece and one of Barney’s lovers, claimed that if you turned the chairs upside down you’d find oysters sprouting underneath them.) The guests were ...”

“... to work immediately after his transcendent experience on the terrace of Casa Guidi. At Rome in the winter of 1860-61 he spent most of his time in the studio of his friend William Wetmore Story, modelling clay figures, too absorbed (or depressed) even to read. In the same period he is known to have offered the ‘Roman murder story’ to a number of his friends ...”

“... labour. What if work itself became a scarce commodity? The downturn in the business cycle in the winter and spring of 1847-48 had pushed thousands of men and women out of work. Did citizens have the right to demand that labour be apportioned to them, as something essential to a dignified existence? It was the effort to answer this question that produced the ...”

“... where the trout twinked to the surface for water boatmen and flies, and take her striding across winter fields where the pheasants whirred up, a flurry of gorgeous feathers against the unrelenting grey; the brogues would plant her on – they would transplant her to – British soil. According to​ the OED, the very first meaning of the word brogue, dating ...”

“... the nomenklatura. The system, ‘totalitarianism harnessed to the task of economic growth’, as Robert Campbell described it twenty-five years ago, was considered something of a success around the world until the late Seventies – mainly because of its ability to reconstruct the economy after the war, on the basis of an industrial machine that was already ...”

“... The estimates for the end of the Thirties ranged from Dallin and Nicolaevsky’s ten million and Robert Conquest’s nine million (the latter figure excluded ‘criminals’) to Wheatcroft’s maximum of four to five million, Jasny’s three and a half million and Timasheff’s two million. Elaborate records in the NKVD archives reveal that about two million ...”

“... concerned – one of the lightest-fingered authors living). In this case, the borrowings are from Robert Aldrich’s Whatever happened to Baby Jane? and John Fowles’s The Collector. A best-selling author, Paul Sheldon, crashes in a desolate area of the Rockies. It is winter, his car is buried in the snow, and his broken ...”

“... the little girl sang, ‘Each morning I am something new ...’ Schwartz’s literary executor, Robert Philips, thinks this is one of Schwartz’s permanent contributions to 20th-century American poetry, but I don’t think he can be serious. There are occasional strikes, such as ‘Mr Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon’, and he never lost his gift for good ...”

“... many people left accounts of what she said and did; but it also meant, as her previous biographer, Robert Halsband, has demonstrated, that dubious anecdotes had a habit of attaching themselves to her. Though Grundy attempts to solve the problem of naming by reserving ‘Montagu’ for the literary career and ‘Lady Mary’ for the rest, the variousness of her ...”

“... loose-jointed figure in a sort of petty officer’s pea jacket skipping ahead on the cold bare winter pavement … He seemed in a state of euphoria rather than drunk, though he’d been drinking more heavily than I’d known him do before.’ The next time they met, Minton was mad, violent and pugnacious; he’d become a Soho person, though not one of ...”

“... They were part of the group of artists associated with Horizon that included Graham Sutherland and Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde and very much not, Craxton later insisted, part of the Ayrton-Minton Neo-Romantics. It wasn’t just that he didn’t know the artists personally, and like most people disliked the bombastic ...”

“... of the yeare . . . the waies deep, the weather sharp, the days short . . . the very dead of Winter.’ Eliot also worked phrases from other passages cited in his essay into other poems, notably Ash Wednesday. There was more to all this than shared churchmanship. In a celebrated comparison between Andrewes and John Donne, Eliot maintained that Andrewes ...”

“... of tuberculosis but the other two lived to a very ripe old age. With the Japanese capture in the winter and spring of 1941-42 of all of South-East Asia, including the Philippines and Indonesia, the work of Golden Lily increased many times over. In addition to the monetary assets of the Dutch, British, French and Americans in their respective colonies, Golden ...”

“... his company, the King’s Men, took over in 1608, and in which they began performing in the winter of 1609-10 (the hiatus was due to a severe outbreak of plague which closed the London theatres for more than a year). The present-day Playhouse Yard, which runs from the western end of Ireland Yard to Blackfriars Lane, marks the site of the theatre – or ...”

“... either (or anyone then or since), asked to be updated on the progress of ‘the battle’ from his winter resort in the Canaries. We know more about what happened on the field of Hastings that October Saturday than about any battle anywhere since Ammianus Marcellinus chronicled the destruction of the East Roman army by the Goths nearly 700 years before. Yet ...”