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“... 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 ...”

“... and which, as the latest general editors point out, would make little sense if the poet was George Herbert. Long reprinted, Bateson’s preface has now disappeared to be replaced by another, this time by the succeeding general editors, John Barnard and Paul Hammond. They claim fidelity to Bateson except where he has come to seem fallible. For ...”

“... fellow students. On graduation Koch moved to New York, where he lived downstairs from the painter Jane Freilicher, became acquainted with the New York art scene, and liked to stare out of the window at passing trains while wearing a gorilla mask. In 1950 he went on a Fulbright to Aix-en-Provence. Not only did he immerse himself in modern French ...”

“... The young Hector was brought up in Devonshire by two supposedly harsh, repressive aunts. Like George Orwell, he served briefly in the Burma police. Invalided out, he was next seen as a near-dandy and struggling writer in London, somewhat given to practical joking. He was also given to what his sister Ethel, who burned his letters after he died, called ...”

“... The list of Leonardo da Vinci’s accomplishments is long and famously various – painter, inventor, anatomist, mathematician, musician and so on – but it seldom includes the word ‘writer’. This is curious considering his enormously prolific output. His extant manuscripts and notebooks run to something like seven thousand pages (though some of them are very small) and this is only a part, perhaps about two thirds, of the total ...”

“... for greatness; Yeats was virtually an autodidact. His father, a wit, a good writer and a gifted painter who rarely finished a picture, was perpetually broke and shamelessly improvident. He wanted his son to be a poet, but seemed not to care much about the boy’s schooling; and however grim the financial prospect, he disliked the notion that his son, being ...”