“... Graham Greene figure’, closely studied by Alec Guinness when he was preparing to become George Smiley; he ‘could never make close ties with people’. Guy Burgess was ‘always dirty and smelt’. This diary is also a love story: ‘The sun was shining and Alan took my hand.’ Eva Taylor considers her husband ‘cleverer than Macaulay’, whose ...”

“... zu Sayn-Wittgenstein, and moving into the Altenburg Palace on the outskirts of town; Thackeray, George Eliot, Smetana, Berlioz and Wagner all visited. Liszt engaged better musicians, improved the repertory, old and new, and included his own compositions. He put Weimar back on the cultural map, but didn’t get the support he hoped for from the court. He ...”

“... allowed in were American and the hearings were timed to coincide with US breakfast TV. If George Bush can pretend for four months that he has Iraq under control he may well be re-elected. If disasters from Iraq continue to dominate the front pages he will probably lose. In April 125 soldiers were killed: the White House needs to show voters that ...”

“... was no longer home to professors and lawyers but to a ‘railway conductor, a seamstress, a house painter, a lathe operator, a panel beater, a cook, three bakers, a hairdresser, two postal workers – one retired’. Many flats had been divided during the economic downturn of the 1930s, now the rest followed. Families shared toilets and kitchens; parquet was ...”

“... to Italy in 1871 and 1873, building on those of 1859 and 1862. Even in his lifetime, his friend George du Maurier was referring to the ‘Burne-Jonesiness of Burne-Jones’. This is the nub of the problem – to those who have one. His style is so tightly-wound, so cumbersomely itself, that the approaching viewer trips over the fact that they’re looking ...”

“... kinds of attention, kinds of wit, that belonged to novelists who were not trying to be men, like George Eliot; anyway, wit is now female, and so is bravado in the choice and handling of themes. Mrs Fitzgerald used to be published by Duckworth, as were or are Caroline Blackwood, Alice Thomas Ellis and Beryl Bainbridge: all practise surprise and cultivate ...”

“... as the mother whose caresses would calm his frenetic disposition. Together with Watts Dunton and George Borrow – then over seventy – he would bathe in the Putney ponds ‘with a north-east wind cutting across the icy waters like a razor’. No towels of course: Borrow would run about the grass like an elderly dog, shaking himself to get dry. For ...”

“... theme recurs, in Turgenev, in Samuel Butler, in Gosse. It is especially prominent in Ireland. George Moore, in his Confessions of a Young Man, blatantly proclaims his sense of liberation and relief when his father died. Synge makes an attempted parricide the theme of his Playboy of the Western World; James Joyce describes in Ulysses how Stephen ...”

“... Beaux Stratagem), Lothario (The Fair Penitent), and the name parts in The Mock Doctor and George Barnwell. Yet, despite this extensive repertoire, she still found her talents unduly circumscribed by being limited to a single part per play. As a strolling player, she found greater opportunities for her virtuoso skills. During a performance of The Beaux ...”

“... of the original meaning, patricius, ‘noble’ (yet those Italians who referred to a certain painter of holy pictures as ‘Sodoma’ knew what they were saying). Rash, Caper and Starvelackey are (rarely, for Shakespeare) cratylic names but they could never be mistaken, says Professor Barton, for real names. Nor for nicknames? Perhaps not, though we ...”

“... Indian Wars, eventually returning home in the person of the 19th-century (Irish?) artist and painter of ‘native Americans’, George Catlin, whose Rushes through the Middle graces the cover of Madoc. Oh, and one other thing. The narrative is sectioned-off into short, mostly self-contained poems, each given the name ...”

“... from images of the War in its first years: black-out blinds, allotments, digging for victory,‘George Formby’s uke’, those wrought iron railings made into shrapnel and grenade, acanthus leaf and fleur-de-lys, victorious artillery, James Cagney films (the only art Harrison shared with his father). When he alludes to other poems, they are mostly poems ...”

“... certainty about his convictions than is easy to come by: the author of ‘Last Instructions to a Painter’ is also the author of ‘To Richard Lovelace’, and of the vitriolic assault on the literary reputation of Tom May. Even by itself, the Horatian Ode is not easy to read: why, for example, did he hope Cromwell would be ‘to Italy an ...”

“... music-hall turn way past his best’), Woodrow Wyatt (‘always a bounder and a cad’) and George Brown (‘an alcoholic for whom the twin obsessions of drink and politics were two attempts to escape from some inner grief’). The aim of biography, he writes, is to understand an individual life by describing all the forces that shape it. Since the ...”

“... as Richard III. Garrick was elected to the Club in 1773; the playwrights Oliver Goldsmith and George Colman were already members and Richard Brinsley Sheridan would be admitted a few years later. The Club wasn’t just full of luvvies; it began with quite serious purposes and ambitions. With his rancorous first biographer, John Hawkins (Johnson coined the ...”