“... 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 ...”

“... the Mackintoshes’ home in Hillhead, although the ethereal white interiors were saved by Andrew Maclaren Young, organiser of the 1968 exhibition and a hero in this sad story. They were eventually reconstructed in a concrete annex to the new Hunterian Museum building. When Murray Grigor, who made a film about Mackintosh in 1968 and soon after ...”

“... The Founding Fathers of the United States were mainly Southerners: between them, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison can take credit for drafting the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, winning the Revolutionary War, and preserving America’s independence through its turbulent early decades ...”

“... Syria, the only way that the civil war will end … is … a government without Bashar Assad.’ George W. Bush: ‘Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.’) To judge by their previous careers, neither Bolton nor Pompeo shares Trump’s conceit that he can destroy the Iranian regime by a method short of war; on the other hand, Trump may ...”

“... the fight against the insurgents in most of the country by the end of 2005. I heard General George Casey, commander of the Multinational Forces in Iraq, say: ‘We should be able to take some fairly substantial reductions in the size of our forces.’ I heard that the insurgents had been driven out of the cities and into the desert and that they were ...”