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“... to the painter Winifred, who stayed behind at their farmhouse in Cumbria to look after their two small children and new baby. At Happisburgh, where the other invited guests included Henry Moore and Ivon Hitchens, Hepworth and Nicholson swam in the sea, played cricket and discussed ideas for their work. Nicholson photographed Hepworth’s naked back and ...”

“... they had acquired from Lady Russell (the Bedford family owned much of Bloomsbury). It was quite small, already surrounded by houses, and longer from north to south than from east to west. James Gibbs, one of the surveyors appointed by the Commissioners (Hawksmoor was the other), submitted one plan, Vanbrugh another. The latter was on a north-south axis ...”

“... between sacrificing his daughter Iphigenia or abandoning the war to recover his brother’s wife, Helen. ‘Which of these is free from evil?’ he asks, in Oliver Taplin’s translation. Jeffrey Bernstein has the wordier ‘Which of these two ways is without evil?’ David Mulroy, the punchier ‘Can either choice be right?’ Agamemnon is in a position ...”

“... death. He has some regular correspondents and confidants – Robert Lachenay, his school friend, Helen Scott, who worked with him on the Hitchcock book, Annette Insdorf, who wrote a book about him – but also writes to friends at the Cahiers, to actors with whom he is working, to journalists requesting information, people who send him scripts, offer him ...”

“... ordinarily assumed to be contemptible has a long history, stretching back to Gorgias’s Eulogy of Helen; Erasmus transformed the tradition when he made Folly herself utter the speech in praise of folly, producing as he did so various paradoxes of self-reference. Burton, it might be said, in some degree follows the Erasmian lead in that, even as he offers an ...”

“... merely a collection of amiable grotesques; Phorkyas lends a grotesque element to the episode of Helen that is quite distinct from the medieval grotesqueries of the poem; the descent to the Mothers alone is enough to show that when Nietzsche wrote that Goethe did not understand the Greeks he himself failed to understand Goethe. Goethe’s prodigious effort ...”

“... done to herself? After Colin Dexter and John Thaw’s Inspector Morse, Ian Rankin’s Rebus and Helen Mirren’s Jane Tennison in Prime Suspect, Rachel raises the tradition of the alcoholic detective to a new level. The novel’s main protagonist spends most of her time on train journeys, with no purpose other than to keep up the pretence that she is still ...”

“... print of Rome, Open City he had purchased for a promised $25,000. It opened in February 1946 at a small moviehouse west of Times Square and played there for twenty months. ‘Recently,’ the film critic James Agee wrote in the Nation, ‘I saw a moving picture so much worth talking about that I am still unable to review it.’ (Agee himself had recently ...”

“... them to do so. For much of the 18th century, these were limited in number, comprising a handful of small, short-lived institutions. London’s first commercial showcase of contemporary art, organised in 1760 by a group calling itself the Present Artists, included work by Katharine Read and the future Academician Mary Moser; exhibitions held subsequently by two ...”

“... everyday life. The significant structures of fiction and of psychopathology seem close here. In my small tribulation, the oddity became normalised, but my normality became distinctly odder, perhaps more artistically patterned, in the process. Dwelling on it – which includes trying to describe it, as I have done – draws out meanings which may be latent in ...”

“... and the author was encouraged by its success to complete a Shakespearean trilogy. Since, as Helen Gardner says, ‘the facts that are clearly established’ about Shakespeare’s life ‘could be written by a neat writer on two sides of a postcard’ (LRB, Vol. 6, No 6), this represents a considerable feat of expansion – but no other kind of feat. At ...”

“... and worldly-wise as he looks. Although Kleinzahler’s work has hitherto only been available in small press publications in this country – Dainties – Viands was published by Newcastle’s Galloping Dog Press in 1985, Blue at 4 p.m. and The Last Big Snow by Northern Lights, and On Johnny’s Times by the Pig Press in 1988 – he has for some time had a ...”

“... rocking on his wings, He scans his wide parish with a sharp eye, He catches the trembling of small hidden things, He tears them to pieces, dropping them from the sky.Yet ‘this is my country,’ the last stanza begins, ‘beloved by me best’. It’s not instantly clear why this poem is Graves’s first piece of authentic work. Though his previous ...”

“... one of the squirts of desperate rage from one of the souls in hell, makes everything else seem small and distant. It’s extremely hard, though, to describe the exact mixture of qualities that makes it wonderful. In the first half of the 20th century the Commedia was often regarded as a classic with a philosophical core ...”

“... and Russia. The Japanese, during their occupation of Korea (1910-45), transformed Chongjin from a small fishing village into an important port, with massive steelworks and chemical factories. It has been closed to foreigners since the Korean War and was also, as Demick notes, one of the places hardest hit by the devastating famine of the mid-1990s. Demick got ...”