“... to the trouble of finding and reproducing an ‘extremely rare’ and unkind caricature of him by Robert Dighton as ‘the Macaroni Painter’. Northcote later claimed that Maria ‘always despised’ Cosway. That would seem to be an exaggeration, but it was, if not exactly a marriage of convenience, certainly a convenient marriage. He was in love; she was ...”

“... tries to rise to as a correspondent, giving exquisite elegies for old friends like Mrs Kemble and Robert Louis Stevenson; even the noble, scrupulous and harrowing account of his loved sister’s last days and hours is improved by an altered phrase. Some things probably came near to defeating him, though he records them desperately. Professor Edel chooses to ...”

“... of her. The recording comes from a film called Broadway Melody of 1938 in which Garland stars with Robert Taylor and Eleanor Powell. It was her first feature-length film for MGM. She had performed the song earlier that year at Gable’s on-set birthday celebrations: he was the studio’s biggest star. Garland made a surprise appearance at the party, posing as ...”

“... he shows the Major the grounds, and after punishing a spaniel for killing a chicken by tying the bird round its neck, indicates a diamond-shaped bed of lavender: ‘“Planted by my dear wife.” After a moment, as if to clear up a possible misunderstanding, he added: “Before she died.”’ That evening, the Major looks out from the cat-filled bar and ...”

“... a flannelette nightie. Did that give licence to the next day’s BBC Book Programme, opened by Robert Robinson on the proposition that ‘the judges made the wrong choice’? A ‘favourite aunt’, ‘a jam-making grandmother’, ‘Pooterish’, ‘distrait’: this is the sort of thing people wrote about the figure Fitzgerald presented, finding a ...”

“... up to the New Abbey. In its surrounds were a tumulus where the ancient Scots kings, including Robert the Bruce, had had their bones interred. And Macbeth himself? Around those grounds were numerous Celtic crosses, planted like miniature saplings, most of them only replicas of destroyed originals. The shape of the Celtic cross was remarkably endearing to ...”

“... queen, part Penguin Modern Classic reader, part theatre door Johnny; or, as the American critic Robert Christgau once put it, ‘a middlebrow fascinated by the power of a highbrow-lowbrow form’. Bowie​ between two poles: laughter-madness-performance v. cool calculation, media plotting. On one hand, the nerveless psychological chess player, three moves ...”

“... Moore would say that she is ‘too unrelenting’ in The Colossus, her first book of poems; Robert Lowell would put the same thought another way by saying that in Ariel she was playing ‘Russian Roulette with six cartridges in the cylinder’. I also remember feeling that I was liking something that it was a cliché for me to like. I thought she was ...”

“... success to increase his notoriety and win some sort of respect among his peers. In January 1886 Robert Louis Stevenson published The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. It sold forty thousand copies in Britain in its first six months. ‘There is something almost impertinent,’ Henry James wrote, ‘in the way … Mr Stevenson achieves his best effects ...”

“... proposition that the body was nothing more than a complex system of measurable physical processes. Robert Koch’s Institute in Berlin was the epicentre for the bacteriological revolution – one pathogen, one disease and, we hope, one vaccine, one cure – which still dominates medical thinking. And so on. By the end of the 19th century the institutional ...”

“... your great-grandfather that is, faced the Luddites … Oh my poor little parrot, fowl or bird, you have much to learn.’The narrative structure of A Legacy is tricky. Timescales jump around a bit, as does the dialogue, and the point of view, supposedly that of the little daughter, does what Bedford herself called ‘a Cheshire cat’, disappearing ...”

“... tune of about £650,000. Between Agnew’s place and Sandringham is Houghton Hall, family seat of Robert Walpole, Britain’s first prime minister, now the home of David, 7th Marquess of Cholmondeley, Lord Great Chamberlain and beneficiary of £260,000 in subsidies. The land Agnew’s house stands on was part, until relatively recently, of Marquess ...”

“... Ewan, to war widowhood in her early twenties, with a little son. In Cloud Howe she marries Robert, a war veteran and Church of Scotland minister, and moves to Segget, a nearby mill town, where Robert dies as his hopes die, for the General Strike of 1926 and for a child of his own. By the time of Grey ...”

“... skeleton’. Olga Roderick … was a traditional bearded lady, and Koo Koo (‘the bird girl from Mars’) appeared to be the victim of progeria, a rare disease that causes rapid and premature ageing.As Browning assembled his actors, he discovered that they were as entitled as any other group of stars. It didn’t bother them, it seemed, that a ...”

“... deception’. Improvising on characters from The Tempest in another great essay, this one about Robert Frost, Auden allocated the first of these kinds of poetry to the spritely Ariel, the second to the worldly Prospero, and suggested that every poet – meaning himself – contained some mixture of the two. But they are evidently two very different sorts of ...”