“... he wrote (again, though, not to Amis), novels that would be ‘a mix of Lawrence, Thomas Hardy and George Eliot’. In order to achieve this aim, he is already shaping up to distance himself from enfeebling human attachments: ‘I find that once I “give in” to another person ... there is a slackening and dulling of the peculiar artistic fibres.’ As early ...”

“... principle, but some are more questionable than others. One of the more surprising inclusions is Andrew Marvell. To classify him as one who suffered ‘the experience of defeat’, we would need more certainty about his convictions than is easy to come by: the author of ‘Last Instructions to a Painter’ is also the author of ‘To Richard Lovelace’, and ...”

“... thin on the ground. It generously acknowledges the Bodleian Library, along with Jim and Pat, George and Gaye, Cheri and Jamie, Nick, Norman and Jane and a horde of fellow boozers at the author’s local pub, not to mention Andrew, Mandana, Bill, Dorcas, Jo, Laura and a host of others at his London club. Some of these ...”

“... the most future-orientated moment in Bleak House is not the trial’s conclusion, but trooper George Rouncewell’s journey north to Sheffield, in Chapter 63, to seek out his brother, a self-made man and owner of a vast iron foundry. George’s first look at the foundry is a look straight through the solid ontology of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”