“... Welles anticipated Andy Warhol, who also enjoys a posthumous existence as a movie character.) George Orson Welles was born in 1915 and appeared first as the wunderkind whose Shakespeare productions – the ‘Fascist’ Julius Caesar, the ‘voodoo’ Macbeth – dazzled New York theatregoers in the 1930s and who, when not spooking radio listeners as the ...”

“... desire for direct contact with the public, and the same is true of the novels, in which, as George Eliot put it, ‘he seems to bring his arm-chair to the proscenium.’ Powerful theatre managers had to be dealt with, like Marplay in The Author’s Farce, but according to the theatre historian Robert Hume, ‘Fielding quickly made himself the most ...”

“... the water of the Severne, Trent or Thames cannot wash away.‘What are private losses,’ Major George Wither asked, ‘while we view/Three famous Kingdoms, woefully expos’d.’ Historians of the period know the frustration of encountering narratives that edge towards, but ultimately recoil from, personal experience. Evidential shortcomings are ...”

“... presumably real events as a press reception for the English Country Cheese Council. Learning that George Best is for sale for £200,000, he toys with the idea of using a recent legacy to buy him as ‘a companion on my occasional visits to the night club scene of our metropolis’, but reflecting that Best has a reputation for being ‘rather off-hand’ with ...”

“... gawping out-of-town tourist an easy mark for a pickpocket. In Covent Garden, two centuries before George Young described the homeless as ‘the people you step over when you come out of the opera’, departing audiences were picking their way through prostitutes and cabbage leaves left over from the market. Shortly after Trafalgar Square was created in the ...”

“... a Word.Rejoice! We are ruled thru’ infinityBy this highly dysfunctional Trinity!10 January. In George Lyttelton’s Commonplace Book it’s recorded that Yeats told Peter Warlock that after being invited to hear ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ (a solitary man’s expression of longing for still greater solitude) sung by a thousand Boy Scouts he set up a ...”

“... exclude technology, Patriotism Appeal and the royal sod. They have on the whole excluded Kipling. Andrew Rutherford’s 1971 Penguin selection tried to smuggle him in by putting the emphasis on the later, more psychologically and artistically complex stories. But as Angus Wilson (President of the Kipling Society) pointed out in his 1977 biography, this ...”

“... suppose I could have been a drunk.One used to see Bacon quite often, as he was a regular guest at George Melly’s across the road. The last time was in Paris when we were having supper at Brasserie Bofinger. Bacon and his party rose to leave, whereupon all the waiters gathered in the window to watch the great man depart – something I could never imagine ...”

“... standards the provenance of the ‘Rabban Pattu’ is modest. According to the St Thomas scholar George Menachery, the ‘Rabban Pattu’ is ‘the substratum of all the traditions concerning the Apostolate of St Thomas in South India, even if some minor details may be backward projections from the concepts of the Church’s life at the time of the latest ...”

“... care – and not just posterity but his younger contemporaries right after his death. The views of George Eliot’s life and work after her death in 1880, and of Trollope’s after his death in 1882, may have given James cause for brooding. The world of 1905 was a long distance from the world of the 1870s when he started, and his own works may have seemed ...”

“... bright, confident style, Coward irresistibly combined reserve and high camp. He became the merry-andrew of moderation, warning mothers to keep their daughters off the stage, confiding, in Present Laughter (1942), that sex was ‘vastly overrated’ and wickedly pleading: ‘don’t let’s be beastly to the Germans.’ Coward was a performer who wrote: not a ...”

“... American, English or Irish politicians. In the course of one of the Canadian invasions, President Andrew Johnson went so far as to delay apprehending the miscreants for five days, although he could have done it at any time. Assuring O’Neill, the Fenian leader, of his sympathy, he added: ‘If you could not get there in five days, by God, you could never get ...”

“... in one or more demonstrations in the theatre at Dumfries in favour of the French and against King George – must be substantially true or Burns would not have had so much trouble apologising for it to his seniors in the Excise. While not taking Burns’s politics seriously, McIntyre judges them on grids provided by notional two-party ...”

“... its speech therapist.Raulff, who has written books on Marc Bloch, Aby Warburg and Stefan George, makes inspired connections across the history of technology, critical theory, military history, cultural anthropology, philosophy and art. Farewell to the Horse is a narrative that combines odd historical back alleys and literary anecdotes with ...”

“... been less impressed. For David Daiches, Wilson is an ‘absolute impostor’ and a ‘windbag’; Andrew Noble tags him ‘the clay-footed prophet of the British-Scots middle-class’. In some respects, Wilson deserves all he gets. As an academic he was a charlatan; as a critic a coward and a bully. He was a forgettable poet and a bad novelist. On the other ...”