“... part of the meaning without ever descending into mere formalism. And what they both had was that brand of humanism which consists in seeing man realistically as only one part of the universe – but which, seeing him thus, gives him back his sense of potential. I realised, too, how many of the paintings and even sculptures dealt with two figures, and the ...”

“... For others perhaps less taken by the satirist, less nostalgic for consumer bric-à-brac and brand-names, the difficulty is in deciding whether the ear is tin, zinc or, on occasion, polythene: What is locked in a book Of a Civil War, of a king ... Might this be King Ofa, by any chance? Double genitives, rush hours of present participles, clumsy ...”

“... subsidise his publishing house, his magazine Poesia, and his campaign to position Futurism as the brand leader in avant-garde art movements. It was a friend of his father’s and a major shareholder in Le Figaro, Mohammed El Rachi, who negotiated the prominent positioning of his call to arms. The manifesto opens with a group of decadents staying up ...”

“... Room and the Patient, a 1906 book which includes a reference to ‘anaesthetic tables’), William James, James Thomson, William Acton, Charles-Louis Philippe, W.R. Burnett (a crime novelist in whose High Sierra – published in 1940 – the phrase ‘She was … a one-night-stand type’ occurs), Edward Winslow ...”

“... the way Rilke or Jarry or Apollinaire did. (Never mind other teen crushes like Charlie Parker and William Burroughs, Frank O’Hara and Andy Warhol.) He felt like a poet with a capital P, writhing in the coils of Church and Satan, Evil and Beauty, Sin and Damnation. Which, God knows, all held plenty of allure for a sulky, half-Catholic male adolescent. But ...”

“... Bunny. The combination of mannered elegance and genuine nervous tension never fails.Ernest William Hornung, always known as Willie, was born in Middlesbrough in 1866, the youngest of eight children of a coal merchant from Transylvania, Johan Petrus Hornung, who anglicised his name to John Peter. Willie was sent off to be thoroughly Englished at ...”

“... of MOOCs. Or so many of his later readers argued, as they stabbed his book with their bent nibs. William Warburton, who saw hieroglyphs as a primitive rather than profound form of writing, found it ‘pleasant’ to watch Kircher ‘labouring through half a dozen folios with the writings of late Greek Platonists, and the forged books of Hermes, which contain ...”

“... he had, Hemingway did not serve in the Italian Army. It was about this time, we are told, that William Faulkner wore a Royal Canadian Air Force officer’s uniform with wings, and cultivated a limp, to none of which he was entitled. All this may sound very silly, but war is a great breeder of lies and the young Hemingway was behaving like a lot of other ...”

“... member of the super-rich elite supported repeal. There were some who hated the idea, including William Gates Sr (father of Bill), Steven Rockefeller, George Soros and Warren Buffet. What is more, the Democratic Party was squarely against the proposal, and wanted to prevent it. Given that the alliance that had been formed to push repeal through was so ...”

“... connections, Bute was decried as the new Highland adventurer. It did not help that another Scot, William Murray, Lord Mansfield, who was dogged by the smear that he was intent on importing Scots Romanist principles into the English common law, had become lord chief justice in 1756. Might Bute and his Scotch cronies find no better use for Magna Carta, English ...”

“... tasked with doing pretty much whatever he thought was needed. His versatility became a personal brand – the Special Systems Division was known as ‘Luie’s Gadgets’. A suite of ‘war-winning’ radar inventions is owed to Alvarez and his colleagues: the ground-controlled approach radar that helped land planes in poor visibility; the ground-based ...”

“... and from politics, while teaching at universities in Iowa and St Louis. The effects of the WPA’s brand of social realism on the painters who became Abstract Expressionists is unclear, but Guston retained a lifelong respect for the business of covering a surface with descriptive conviction (as did de Kooning); ‘sign painter’ was a term of praise, early ...”

“... of Eeyore-ism, ‘my Muse of national demise’. He can sound sometimes like the hero of Ibsen’s Brand, which he translated for the National Theatre, a ferocious moralist whose diatribe is at once thrilling and appalling: ‘This entire Age is devoid/of grace or merit;/it’s ruled by creeping pride,/dull frivolity,/meanness of spirit.’ This lament at the ...”

“... was not the only contemporary to wonder in retrospect at the Auden effect – what the painter William Coldstream called ‘a real magic and glamour in his presence’ – and shrewdly put his finger on part of it: the figure Auden cut was at once impressive and comical, as though acting out some great running joke about authority or seriousness. He strode ...”

“... many of them based on Pliny, Aristotle and others. ‘Sir Thomas Browne in the 17th century and William Cobbett in the early 19th, both of them acute observers, held the Classical writers responsible for the bulk of English rural superstitions.’ Nor was the attack on ‘vulgar errors’ a new one, a new battle of world views in the 16th and 17th ...”