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“... I was rapt, like a hysterical spinster on her first visit to Bayreuth. Schwärmerei time for T-Ball.The Sarajevo obsession revealed itself early on: in fact, inspired the great comic episode in this brief golden period. We were walking down University Avenue, Palo Alto’s twee, boutique-crammed main drag, on our way to a bookshop. Sontag was wearing her ...”

“... irony (Huck’s account of the contents of the catfish’s stomach – a brass button, a round ball ‘and lots of rubbage’ – is pure Defoe). At Morton’s Academy, students were taught science and other subjects in English, not in Greek or Latin, a radical idea at the time, and they were also instructed in the art of writing good English prose, an ...”

“... and choose). In the 1950s, such admiration was not typical. At Eisenhower’s 1953 inauguration ball, a musical portrait of Lincoln by Aaron Copland – a full orchestral piece with excerpts from his speeches – was dropped at the last minute as ‘un-American’. But Lincoln was crucial to Monroe. Carl Sandburg, his biographer, became an important friend ...”

“... I sit on his knee as he hums ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’. My grandmother says: ‘George, teaching that child Protestant hymns!’ I dip my finger in his beer to taste it. For high days I have a thimble-sized glass to drink port. My grandmother says: ‘George, teaching that child to ...”

“... discusses some refurbishing of the Louvre, ‘Napoleone’, using the original Corsican spelling. George Eliot in her sardonic reference in Middlemarch to those ‘amazing gentlemen’ who perhaps find consolation ‘in the sense of a stupendous self and an insignificant world’, or Gertrude Stein in frequent comparisons between her acts of literary ...”

“... is written in that free-associative style Empson used in his first published poem, ‘Poem about a ball in the 19th century’, and in another here printed, called ‘Address to a Tennis Player’; the notes to the poems express some doubt about the virtues of this manner, and they seem justified, but he kept the first poem in the Collected and perhaps ...”

“... tongs of his own, in place of Monsieur le Blanc himself, to dress a lady’s hair in time for a ball. ‘All his friends had ten thousand a year; he talked of his horses and his carriages, his estate and his interest; and when he addressed you as a lady, you could not help drawing back for fear he should give you a kiss.’ Miss Townshend, she writes, was ...”

“... reader cares enough to decide which is which. He clogs scenes with lectures; an account of a drag ball, for instance, is drowned out by paragraphs of miscellaneous erudition: ‘So priests down through the ages, skirted in respectful imitation of androgynous deities who reigned before Baal was worshipped as a pillar, before Osiris sported erection, before men ...”

“... of them in fact. She told her granddaughter late in life that she and Henri had met at a costume ball in Brussels. She had been dressed as Elizabeth I; he – appropriately enough for a prince – had been a slim, pomaded, unusually fetching Hamlet. 3. The Doted-On Wastrel Son. Prince Henri’s By-Blow, Most Likely. Bernhardt had him in 1864, when she was ...”

“... fruit, flying kites made of old newspapers, fishing in the river with my father, playing ball’. Provincial children of a similar social class in oil-importing countries which were even poorer, such as Colombia next door, or in Central America or the Caribbean, had considerably less favourable life chances. Even so, Chávez only occasionally ...”

“... of a poem to perk him up. It pays tribute to the American baseball star Ted Williams: ‘Watch the ball and do your thing/This is the moment. Here’s your chance/Don’t let anyone mess with your swing.’ He responds gratefully: ‘Brilliant poem. We need a British version of it.’ Brown hopes this picture is enough to give a sense of the unique challenge ...”

“... of Blake’s visionary portraits – part fraudulent, part inspired. Shadows in a crystal ball. The London Ackroyd, interlocutor for Dickens and Dan Leno, had shifted his critical position from Modernism to heritage curation, clarifying with clear lines all that had previously been ambiguous. Pound, with whom Ackroyd began, was no longer a fashionable ...”

“... time when the study of ancient Ireland was becoming politically resonant. He became friendly with George Petrie, who had done much to revitalise the antiquities committee of the Royal Irish Academy, and was responsible for its acquisition of important Irish manuscripts. Wilde worked with Petrie in County Meath, north of Dublin, discovering the remnants of ...”

“... bombs went off all over the country in a spree that saw 120 dead. It was two years exactly since George W. Bush had announced that ‘major combat operations’ in Iraq were over, an anniversary marked that week with 17 co-ordinated bombings in Baghdad. May 2nd is the date of Joseph McCarthy’s death and J. Edgar Hoover’s. It is the date of Tony Blair’s ...”

“... Luther King Sr allowed the Ebenezer Baptist Church choir, dressed as house slaves, to sing for a ball celebrating the 1939 première of Gone with the Wind. His ten-year-old son was dressed as a pickaninny. King was criticised by his fellow Baptist ministers, but not for seeming to endorse the Lost Cause: they said he shouldn’t have performed for a ...”