“... writing. As he would have wished, she puts more of an emphasis on the historical novels – Witch Wood (1927) was his favourite – and his status as a Scottish monument, a descendant of Scott and Stevenson. There’s nothing fanciful about this – Janet Adam Smith reported that Clement Attlee pointed out to her a borrowing from Kidnapped in The Thirty-Nine ...”

“... upon a time it was winter & snowed down from the sky and a queen sat at a window of ebony wood & sewed.’ The equivalent in the first printed version is: ‘Once upon a time it was the middle of winter and the snowflakes fell like feathers from the sky. A beautiful queen sat and sewed at a window that had a frame made of black ebony.’Myths rapidly ...”

“... painting in four or five of those submitted was rejected. In 1873, however, during the reign of Charles Blanc, more than half did not make it to the wall. Blanc, a critic and art theorist, showed that scandal-fearing politicians were much less dangerous than those, like Blanc, who took schemes for the improvement of art and morals seriously. The Salon ...”

“... to the Burgh Court Hall with their babes in arms. The municipal buildings. Everything smelled of wood waxing. A nervous succession of tenants would rise before the Baillie. ‘Why do you not pay your rent?’ ‘My man’s at the Front. No money. The wean’s sick. A don’t have it.’ ‘Three weeks to pay, or eject.’ Sometimes: ‘Pay by Wednesday, or ...”

“... Gauguin as a ‘defender of the savages’. At a subsequent auction, he bought several canvases, wood carvings, some notebooks and Gauguin’s palette, 24 lots in all for 190 francs, or a little less than a month’s pay. This wasn’t a bit of speculative connoisseurship: at the time he seems to have had little interest in the work as such; rather, he was ...”

“... Henry Horne says something offensive to a young lady named Rita when her brother Charles is by to protect her. Can you hear the two different tones in which she says their respective names, “Henry Horne! Charles!” I can hear it better than I can say it.’ On other occasions, Frost makes his point by ...”

“... of the Hudson. In New York, Oppen met Louis Zukofsky, who had already been published by Pound, and Charles Reznikoff, an attorney at work on a law encyclopedia. The three poets, grown uneasy with Imagism and keen to distinguish themselves, conceived a publishing venture which was very much in the Oppens’ mind when they took off for Europe in 1929. They ...”

“... in one of Netflix’s numberless true crime productions (viz, a reconstructed FBI interview with Charles Manson, peddling his ‘blame it on the Beatles’ spiel); a ‘previously unseen’ Beatles-at-home photo from 1963; a ‘previously unseen’ Beatles photo at Shea Stadium from 1965; a hip young mixadelic band citing ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ as ...”

“... speaker, is the masterpiece of such skewed vision: the ‘dreadful hollow behind the little wood’ with which it begins is the grandfather of all those marvellous Audenesque landscapes of ‘silted harbours, derelict works,/The strangled orchard or the silent comb’; and, just like the Audenesque, the Tennysonian manner created an imaginative world ...”

“... for passing information that John Terry’s mother had been cautioned for shoplifting, and Ronnie Wood for assaulting his girlfriend; and Tracy Bell, a pharmacy assistant at Sandhurst, who had sold five stories about Princes William and Harry in 2005 and 2006 for around £1000. The arrests of journalists began on 4 November 2011 with Jamie Pyatt, a prolific ...”

“... consort, Edith Swan-Neck, mother of his children. This piece, by the Anglo-German sculptor Charles Augustus William Wilke, was banished from the grounds of Hastings Museum to a corner of the West Marina Gardens in St Leonards-on-Sea adequate to its transcendent obscurity. The decaying low-baroque tableau of conjugal tenderness, features eaten away by ...”

“... comedies turned on displacement or dislocation. The lovers of Athens find themselves in the wood in A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Rosalind, Celia and Touchstone move from the court into the Forest of Arden in As You Like It; Bassanio sets out from Venice to Belmont in his expensive, credit-fuelled wooing of Portia in The Merchant of Venice. In The ...”

“... was arrested for participating in the Paris Commune, and in jail became friends with a musician, Charles de Sivry, whose mother – Antoinette-Flore Mauté – was a talented pianist and teacher who claimed to have been a pupil of Chopin’s (as it happened, she was also Verlaine’s mother-in-law). It was Madame Mauté who recognised Debussy’s exceptional ...”

“... public recognition. By comparison, key framers of the Reconstruction Amendments – James Ashley, Charles Sumner, Lyman Trumbull and Thaddeus Stevens – are obscure. Unfamiliar, too, are the origins and back stories of their constitutional handiwork, which Foner ably describes.Throughout his career Foner has championed progressive radicalism in the American ...”

“... with cardboard and resoled them with cork or rope, made their own hats out of old newspapers and wood shavings, unravelled empty grain sacks so as to knit the scratchy yarn into underwear and socks, and stitched together new dresses from the good bits of worn-out ones. Eventually, they remade the uniforms of their slain husbands and sons into clothes for ...”