“... Jacobean tragedy, but there were enough of them and of attempted assassinations – the murders of William the Silent and Henri III and Henri IV of France; the attempt to poison Queen Elizabeth; the numerous plots, in both his kingdoms, on the life of James VI and I – for threats and rumours of regicide to place nations on recurrent high alert. In life and ...”

“... chosen subjects – the proletariat – to seize control of their world. They would be history’s masters, not its victims. Gareth Stedman Jones came across Sartre’s writings on Marxism when he was about the same age Sartre had been when he first read Marx. A Francophile in his adolescence, Stedman Jones had worked in Paris for Agence France-Presse before ...”

“... incunabula and rare folios, immaculately printed on large paper, bound by Jean Grolier and other masters of the book arts. They preferred unique items, though they often had to settle for the very rare.Lamb had loved his books, and the hunt for them, as much as any of those grandees. In his informal, allusive, often nostalgic Essays and Last Essays of ...”

“... authors whose names are whispered among the cognoscenti like a confederation of secret masters: Gerald Kersh, James Curtis, Mark Benney, Robert Westerby, Alexander Baron, John Lodwick, Jack Trevor Story. They have been struck from the canon, these technicians, these life-enhanced witnesses. They are noticed only by slumming journalists (who have ...”

“... degree, of the Ancien Régime, before petering out, in the next two decades, into a set of dancing-masters, hairdressers, mercenaries, literary poseurs and embittered snobbish old roués. The Russian emigration of the 1920s still awaits its historian. The Weimar emigration is a different matter. It hit any country that it affected with the force of a powerful ...”

“... Casa Guidi. At Rome in the winter of 1860-61 he spent most of his time in the studio of his friend William Wetmore Story, modelling clay figures, too absorbed (or depressed) even to read. In the same period he is known to have offered the ‘Roman murder story’ to a number of his friends (including Anthony Trollope and Tennyson) and the idea that he himself ...”

“... good place not to go out from. A self-curated mausoleum of memories: photographs, toys, magazines, William Morris wallpaper, Arts and Crafts furniture; a library of Victorian and Edwardian fiction, Stevenson, Meredith, Wells, Conrad, W. Pett Ridge. Moorcock, with his sacred cats in a basket, brings up a map of London on his screen, shifting and rearranging ...”

“... form, Lane and Dryfeld are ghostly presences who slip the net of social identity. They are also masters of appearance, always turning up ahead of the horde in the frantic search for finds. Recognising no ‘intrinsic values’ beyond customer demand, the book market is a ‘world metaphor’. A Poundian echo declares Lane symbolic of his ...”

“... a wealth of unfamiliar lore. We learn of black women slaves who refused to be ‘bred’ by their masters; ‘feeble-minded’ (that is to say, sexually adventurous and poor) girls and young women put into mental hospitals and kept there until they agreed to sterilisation; Indian tribes virtually wiped out thanks to federally funded involuntary sterilisation ...”

“... make-over quangos. Welcome to the nouveaux aristos: Lord Rogers, Sir Cameron Mackintosh. Welcome, masters of spectacle: the designer Stephen Bayley and Ken Robinson (who Bayley glosses as ‘in charge of lavatories, parking, visitor flow’). Jobs for those who missed out on Channel 4, Arts Council panjandrums, reality benders. A seat on the board for Bob ...”

“... of ‘pastiche Auden’ in his early work, but it became clearer in the 1940s that his real poetic masters were Hardy and, more indirectly, Wordsworth. By the 1950s this could have made for recognition of unobvious continuities with the disciplined mundanity of a younger poet such as Larkin rather than with either the metaphysical disjunctions of post-Eliot ...”

“... and documentary materials, because Guston apprenticed himself as a muralist, influenced by Mexican masters such as David Alfaro Siqueiros and intensely preoccupied by considerations of social justice in action. His works were monumental, site-specific and scattered, and not all have survived. Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration (WPA) employed him from ...”

“... and he soon became a must-see metropolitan attraction. Joshua Reynolds painted his portrait and William Parry did an ensemble piece of Mai, Solander and Banks. Mai met the king, Dr Johnson and Fanny Burney; a play about him was performed at the Theatre Royal; he learned to play chess and backgammon, and many agreed with Mrs Thrale’s comment about the ...”

“... triumphant eclecticism’. Among the figures he mentions are, of course, Anquetil-Duperron and Sir William Jones, the founder of Indology, whose researches on the Orient, Hinduism and the Sanskrit language include translations from – and, in effect, the recovery of – the great fourth-century Sanskrit poet Kalidasa. Yet Said is hard on Jones – ‘whereas ...”

“... and before those still lodging in the rectory were dispersed, I visited the house by invitation of William Bock, who acted as spokesperson for the collective. Will, as might have been expected under the circumstances, looked pale, convalescent, chilled. He hugged himself under a poncho of blankets, drawing up his legs on the sofa, before he launched into his ...”