“... I remember being woken to the rightness of their hyperbole when I found them misquoted in Paul Foot’s Red Shelley, where they become, even in ‘corrected’ editions, Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive And to be young was very heaven. Gone is the intoxicated youthful illogic, by which even ‘bliss’ can be trumped. That ‘And’ as we turn into ...”

“... harmlessly away). Katharina’s case stalled until October 1616, when Einhorn sent a report to John Frederick, the duke of Württemberg, detailing the accusations against her, which now included hurting children. Ducal councillors ordered the governor to detain the suspect. But Katharina had already left Leonberg to be with her son in Linz. Katharina made ...”

“... that under the Reconstruction Acts the white population of the South would be ‘trodden under foot to protect niggers’. In his annual message to Congress of 1867, he declared that blacks had ‘shown less capacity for government than any other race of people’. They had never produced any civilisation and when left to themselves relapsed into ...”

“... arranged,’ Virginia Woolf wrote, disparaging the kind of fiction associated with Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy and H.G. Wells. It’s a proposition that might appeal to Simon Okotie. But before deciding whether it has merit he would want to see whether an apparently symmetrical arrangement of gig-lamps might not, on close examination, prove ever so ...”

“... biography that navigates the relationship between Jews, art and money in the years around 1900.John Singer Sargent seems to be in fashion: his ‘dollar princesses’ are on display at Kenwood House (until 5 October); his early years are the subject of a major show at the Musée d’Orsay, opening this month. For a long time, however, his work provoked ...”

“... A mong​ John Clare’s drawings of ‘pootys’ (snail shells) and birds is a doodle of his imagined tombstone. It bears the inscription: ‘HERE Rest the HOPES and Ashes of JOHN CLARE.’ The masons missed the memo. Clare’s actual memorial, erected after his death in 1864, reads ‘Northamptonshire Peasant Poet’, borrowing the epithet from the title page of his first collection, Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery (1820 ...”

“... paying a price for it in the form of global warming, acid rain and so forth. Over a century ago, John Ruskin was arguing that Cartesian (‘modern’) thought had destroyed man’s reverence and wonder in the face of the external world, and that the death of God-in-nature would eventually bring the end of nature. Gore’s book is squarely in this ...”

“... but a necessary pleasure. Yet Gautam would not have changed his mind had not Anil, at five foot and half an inch, had the temerity to say: ‘Of course I’m going’ – as if it were a right it would be foolish not to exercise. If Anil, at his height, could suffer to relinquish the shield and protection of his white school uniform for the daring ...”

“... that the extra information in the painted images, even to a degree in the photographed ones like John Coplans’s black and white prints, can bear being looked at for longer. There are colours the projector cannot match, there is information about how the painter used his hands, how he responded to the task of showing what an eye or a ...”

“... of a head, the angle of a leg, or the loop of a skipping rope add movement. English painters like John Bratby and Jack Smith were drawing on similar subjects with a not dissimilar, calculated clumsiness that trades crispness for directness, as though seeking to match the thing drawn in the accent of the drawing. ‘Catterline in Winter’, c.1963. Her ...”

“... whacking people.’ (Doubtless insurgents talk like this too.) Again Filkins applied a discreet foot to the pedal and one of the men came out with a ‘remarkable thing’: ‘He was describing some woman who had kind of stepped in front of – the insurgent had stepped behind her, so he said, yeah, he shot this woman, and he said, “The chick got in the ...”

“... may seem quixotic; besides, Professor Marwick covers himself by invoking another Professor, Sir John Plumb, but these two gentlemen between them certainly have no respect for the feelings of the dead. ‘George III’s wife, Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, was so manifestly ugly that the King’s bouts of madness, Professor Sir ...”

“... drink(s) in exchange for a mint copy of Giles Goatboy, or of swopping some multi-volume reissue of John Cowper Powys for a night out on the town. The Chancery Lane idea is (or used to be) that you can sell off review copies for half their published price. The books had to be in really good condition (hence the loving care with which one would sometimes see a ...”

“... tracked three Russian submarines in the North Atlantic, again outside UK territorial waters. John Healey, the then defence secretary, claimed that the submarines had been surveying underwater pipelines and telecommunications cables. HMS St Albans dropped buoys at intervals to let one of the submarines know it was watching. After a time, the ...”

“... where Shardlake’s is angular, his hair cropped where Shardlake’s is floppy. Poer has a two-foot-long sword, Shardlake a blunt dagger, ‘usually worn only for ornamentation’.Shardlake is moved by beauty and feels for animals. He talks to horses, reviles bear-baiting and is distressed by a cage of shrieking scabby parrots he sees unloaded at the ...”