“... if only for a while, and only for a relative handful of readers. This is better than what Walter Benjamin calls God’s remembrance, since God, in Paley’s view, is another of those men who are always looking the other way. A character in one of her stories draws up an inventory of all her troubles. ‘The list when complete could have brought tears ...”

“... to Holyhead. The Company failed soon enough and Jones returned to writing, publishing two sub-Walter Scott epic poems, Corayda and Lord Lindsay, and most ambitiously, My Life, a verse novel cum autobiography which Taylor sees as having affinities with Tennyson’s ‘Locksley Hall’. The main character is Jones’s idealised version of himself as the ...”

“... On​ 14 November 1968, New York University hosted a debate between the economists Walter Heller and Milton Friedman at the Graduate School of Business, a block from Wall Street. The event was advertised as a confrontation between two men engaged in a war for the soul of American economic policy. In retrospect, it might not sound like a clash of the titans – Milton Friedman versus who? – but in 1968 Walter Heller was a well-known figure ...”

“... and it was there, on her arrival, that Hannah Arendt deposited the surviving manuscripts of Walter Benjamin. Characteristically, and perhaps accurately, she thought that the Frankfurt people handled them dishonestly. New York in the Fifties was Weimar in partibus. There are emigrations and emigrations. Chateaubriand elegantly described the French ...”

“... Was​ the course of 20th-century British painting set when Walter Sickert decided he didn’t like standing out in the cold? His first biographer (and former student), Robert Emmons, insisted that ‘SICKERT IS ONE OF THE IMPRESSIONISTS’ on the grounds that, though not an original member, he was ‘so closely allied to them both in method and sentiment, as to take his place, naturally and inevitably, within the innermost circle of the school ...”

“... turn up at auctions, and fetch good prices too, chief justices, lords lieutenant, lords mayor, George Moore, Sir William Orpen, Sir John Lavery, Walter Osborne, Jack Yeats, my famous namesake his brother Bill, Padraic Colum, John Millington Synge, young painters like Paddy Tuohy who really did paint old J.S. Joyce and ...”

“... poet, was born in 1757. His grandfather, the legendary ‘Chevalier’ Taylor, had been oculist to George II, and afterwards, so his grandson assures us, to ‘every crowned head in Europe’. He was as famous for his womanising as for his knowledge of ophthalmology, but most famous, perhaps, for his habit of prefacing every operation he performed with a long ...”

“... to get a bus to safety and Pateley Bridge; VE night outside Guildford Town Hall, me on my Uncle George’s shoulders marvelling at floodlights which I’d never seen before. And Grandma Peel sitting in her chair at Gilpin Place in 1949, beginning to bleed from the womb, and as Aunty Kathleen cleans her up, joking grimly: ‘Nay, lass, I’m 78 but I think I ...”

“... to give to prove divinity, & that Marlowe told him that he hath read the atheist lecture to Sir Walter Ralegh and others’. The informer then goes on to itemise some of Cholmeley’s ‘horrible & damnable speeches’, many of which closely echo the blasphemies attributed by Baines to Marlowe. Another thing the Note and the Remembrances have in common is ...”

“... cable, 301 miles long, is laid in the bed of the Black Sea, stretching from the monastery of St George, in the Crimea, to Kalerga, on the Bulgarian shore. Information about the course of the war was brought to the British public with great speed by the Times’s Applegath rotary printing press, which could deliver ten thousand impressions an hour. It’s ...”

“... Is this the period, then, when Britain became a property-owning democracy? Was it a nation of Walter Mittys tending their herbaceous borders while dreaming of derring-do? In other words, should Pugh replace Orwell on college reading lists and in the popular mind? The answer is no. Pugh’s book is engaging and full of illuminating vignettes, but as a ...”

“... of moon and sun-worship and fertility-ritual – in effect, the Key to All Mythologies for which George Eliot’s Mr Casaubon had so fruitlessly sought. Frazer’s The Golden Bough had shown how such a key could be announced to the world: not as a poetic revelation, but in the secular modern form of a scholarly treatise. In The Greek Myths, Graves suppresses ...”

“... from the discussion of Wilde’s Gwendolen on the name ‘Ernest’ (‘the only safe name’) to Walter Shandy’s high hopes from ‘Trismegistus’ for his little son, in Sterne. Similarly, in a book haunted by cats, we never learn whether ‘Tybalt’ (‘prince of cats’) really does mean ‘cat’. From this one might have stepped to the extreme ...”

“... question asking for Amy Winehouse’s ‘Love Is a Losing Game’ to be compared with a ballad by Walter Raleigh. Here, in a lecture on comic timing, Griffiths reads a passage from Swift’s True and Faithful Narrative of What Passed in London alongside an article from the Evening Standard. Swift’s satire imagines the behaviour of various inhabitants of ...”

“... immediately. The next day a makeshift fence surrounded it. ‘Baudelaire loved solitude,’ Walter Benjamin wrote, ‘but he wanted it in a crowd.’ Today any area that might attract a crowd has shut down and Governor Cuomo frowns on walks. You can still find ‘crowds’, but they’re made up of people you already know but can’t risk seeing ‘in ...”