“... he was perhaps not wholly aware of himself, I’d probably done him a favour of precisely the kind William Blake advocated. I didn’t have quite the gall to mention Blake but that was more or less my tack: what I’d written would help him out. Not too awful as these exchanges go, but not one likely to ennoble either of us in the history of ...”

“... recognised themselves. Not all were weird or wild: I was surprised to read that Christopher Morris, later a friendly colleague of mine, correctly identified himself and his wife as the ‘darling dodos’ of the excellent story that provided the title of Wilson’s second volume. This account of him inevitably raises the question why, with all his ...”

“... vaulting, or any other such harmless recreation, nor from having of May-games, Whitsun-ales, and Morris-dances; and the setting up of May-poles and other sports therewith used: so as the same be had in due and convenient time, without impediment or neglect of divine service.In 1628, colonists at Merrymount, not far from Plymouth Plantation, did exactly as ...”

“... Flaherty to cinéma vérité (which despite its name was American before it was French) to Errol Morris. And as for allowing into fiction the scent of documentary, no fictional method has more of a documentary flavour than the way of making movies devised by John Cassavetes. His movies have been more admired in Europe, it is true; they are nonetheless ...”

“... spoken by the (real-life) biographer George Ticknor about his (real-life) subject, the historian William Prescott. But recent projects have been more collaborative: in 2009, Heti appeared as ‘Leonore’ in Leanne Shapton’s love story disguised as an auction catalogue, Important Artefacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Leonore Doolan and ...”

“... are newcomers to MoMA).* Elderfield has worked in P&S for years, under the directorships of both William Rubin (1973-88) and Kirk Varnedoe (1988-2000). Yet Elderfield’s final show in the old building, Modern Starts (2000), was cause for concern: a post-historical hodgepodge of disparate works placed together in lookalike groupings under such generic titles ...”

“... modernist Wei Yuan, followed Huang’s lead. Their writings, neglected at the time, undergird William Theodore de Bary’s argument that China had a ‘liberal tradition’ of constitutional thought. The legal theorist Xu Zhangrun, who was dismissed from Tsinghua University in July last year for his criticisms of Xi Jinping’s regime, invokes this ...”

“... and of an increasingly manifest destiny becomes unmistakable. Sceptics such as the historian William Bouwsma have argued that even the roi soleil did not always get his own way. Monarchs who wanted to throw their weight about remained as short of cash as ever. Even under Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the greatest of mercantilists (as proponents of the new ...”

“... like Gottlieb and new ones like Marcus Rothkowitz (soon to become Mark Rothko). He came to know William Baziotes and later, through Rothko, Clyfford Still, and then Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell and Ad Reinhardt. According to Motherwell, the group opposed art dedicated either to ‘social values’ or to formalist aesthetics, and they agreed that ...”

“... included among the subjects of the Selborne Circle of Rural Writers reading group alongside White, William Cobbett, W.H. Hudson and George Sturt. Unfortunately for Mabey, who hoped to find in Thompson an undiscovered nature writer, she was no White (some of the best bits of Mabey’s book are about him) and the Grayshott literary scene made her even less sure ...”

“... Alex Comfort​ was exhausting. After meeting him, the pioneering sex researchers William Masters and Virginia Johnson swapped notes. ‘If we could learn to produce on a 24-hour level the way he does, I think we’d probably have it made,’ Johnson said. ‘Five or six hours is all I can stand,’ Masters replied ...”

“... anthropophagy are no more than genre conventions. Neither Hulme nor Obeyesekere is as sceptical as William Arens, whose well-known book, The Man-Eating Myth, was first published 20 years ago. Although he was careful not to deny the theoretical possibility of cannibalism, he claimed then that there was no reliable evidence for it. The book caught the spirit of ...”

“... thought known as ‘Young Earth creationism’, which was popularised by John Whitcomb and Henry Morris in The Genesis Flood (1961). Unlike ‘Old Earth creationists’ or ‘intelligent design’ theorists, who diverge from the biblical account of Creation in six days but nevertheless interpret the natural world as evidence of divine creation, Young Earth ...”

“... field. Perhaps because of her background in dance – she has written a wonderful book on Mark Morris and edited an unexpurgated version of Nijinsky’s diaries* – Acocella locates herself, figuratively speaking, at a kind of middle distance from her subjects: as if she were watching them from a well-placed seat (perhaps thirty or forty feet away?) in a ...”

“... possible.) There was an element of the publicity stunt about it. Will Kemp, the comic, had morris-danced from London to Norwich in 1599 and published a book about it, Kemps Nine Daies Wonder; Coryate walking through Europe was a similar stunt. This is not to deny the genuine hunger for travel that impelled it. ‘There hath itched a very burning desire ...”