“... Thomas Holcroft, Amelia Alderson, Mary Hays and Charlotte Smith, as well as Godwin’s publisher George Robinson and a number of dissenting ministers who, largely forgotten now, were important public intellectuals in the 1790s. The last third is largely taken up by letters to Wollstonecraft, and the volume at that point seems to make a new beginning. So ...”

“... with local fevers. And out of those tossings and turnings a strange and clear prosody was born. George Plimpton has tripped on a handy way of telling the story of a life, so long as that life happens to be one like Truman Capote’s. In place of an account shaped by Plimpton’s sentences, what we have is a birth-to-death narrative made up of the voices of ...”

“... with a group of US fiction writers around his age that includes the late David Foster Wallace, George Saunders, Jonathan Franzen and Jeffrey Eugenides. There are a few things that set Antrim apart: he’s Southern; his strongest affinity to a writer in the previous generation is to Donald Barthelme, not Don DeLillo; he’s the least likely to be ...”

“... born on its outskirts in 1932 – provided the background to her early books. But in the view of George Melly, also from the city, it left her and her prose with something more fundamental: a specific flavour. As a jolly man who loved to sing the blues, Melly, not quoted here, was in a good position to assess a particular Liverpudlian trait: that of ...”

“... their son unnamed in order to spare the child ridicule. (‘You can’t mess up ———.’) The painter in So Much Blue (2017) has spoken the title of his long-gestating work-in-progress just once ‘under my breath while I was alone in my studio’ and fears that his children ‘might try to name it and so ruin it and everything’.There are various ways ...”

“... arrogance of Coriolanus, the tears of Desdemona, and the outrageousness and ingratitude of Prince George as Prince Hal. Henry Crawford in Mansfield Park remarks that ‘one gets acquainted with Shakespeare without knowing how. It is a part of an Englishman’s constitution.’ Shakespeare was certainly very much there in spirit, partly due to the acting of ...”

“... or a novel anyway, if not a piece of theatre?), and I’ll have just one genuine artist present, a painter whose pictures are full of doors and mirrors, and she’ll go off and drown herself in the bathtub – just think of the symbolism! And I’ll put in a bit of religious allegory, with the party representing a hell on earth and the actress’s body ...”

“... historical problems. It opens the floodgates of anecdote and quaint observation. The Florentine painter Piero di Cosimo lived only on hard-boiled eggs. Sumerian workmen were sometimes given beer in lieu of wages. Ships’ biscuits remained edible, when mixed with water, for up to fifty years. The fore-stomach of the flea becomes blackened by ‘a solid mass ...”

“... Medici Venus was admired, as the Cnidian statue had been, in alarming ways. The bibliophile Henry George Quin, for instance, records in his diary (extracts of which were published in an amusing article by Arthur Rau in the Book Collector in 1964) how, in the winter of 1785, he ‘stole’ into the Tribuna of the Uffizi in Florence when no one was there and ...”

“... medievalist who saw the ‘life of forms’ as an almost autonomous force in art, and the American George Kubler, an expert in pre-Columbian artefacts for whom the Panofskyan emphasis on individual style, strict chronology and iconographic analysis (the hunting for sources of images in documents) was not helpful in a field where known artists, exact dates and ...”

“... on TV. I can remember a time when ursine influencers were reliably geezerish, like Hofmeister’s George in his pork-pie hat and yellow satin jacket (‘For a great lager, follow the bear’). But cuddliness resumed in the 1990s, in successive Coca-Cola Christmas campaigns, and hasn’t let up since. Bears distribute their weight towards their hind legs, and ...”

“... her English public and disappoints them by turning out to have false teeth and a glass eye. The painter Benjamin Haydon approaches a crisis in his unhappy career. Browning annoys Jane Carlyle by putting a hot kettle down on her new carpet. Haydon takes his own life. So, from day to day and street to street, the sublime and the ridiculous appear in the ...”

“... history is one of those heartwarming stories of literary virtue rewarded. Her first book, Poor George (1967), generated considerable critical excitement. Desperate Characters (1970) was described as ‘brilliant’ by Alfred Kazin and Irving Howe; Lionel Trilling called it ‘reserved and beautifully realised’. Six years later Karl Miller found The ...”

“... pneumatic tyre in 1888, and most car and bicycle tyres use essentially the same valve patented by George Schrader in 1893. The same period also saw the extension of continuous processing for mass consumption, with systems that continue to be used today. The crimped bottle cap as we know it was invented in Baltimore in 1891 by William ...”

“... on the morning of 2 November 2004; it was probably no coincidence that this was also the day when George W. Bush was expected to be voted back into office. Van Gogh was a fourth-generation descendant of the painter, but better known in Amsterdam and the rest of the Netherlands as a film-maker, writer, columnist, chat-show ...”