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“... a diary composed in imitation 18th-century English purportedly detailing Lovecraft’s affair with Robert Barlow, a horror fan, collector and briefly Lovecraft’s literary executor. In fact Lovecraft spent six weeks at the 15-year-old Barlow’s family home in Florida at Barlow’s invitation in 1933. It was an uncharacteristic journey for the reclusive and ...”

“... was noisy, lively, inventive – a ‘political carnival’, as Lynn Bennie, James Mitchell and Robert Johns describe it in their new book, Surges in Party Membership: The SNP and Scottish Greens after the Independence Referendum (Routledge, £135). Its ‘innovative campaigning methods’ included ‘campaign stalls, impromptu flash mobs, city marches and ...”

“... on the edge of Hampstead Heath and one of the finest surviving examples of the mature designs of Robert Adam. Two years later, Lord Iveagh died, bequeathing Kenwood to the nation, along with 63 Old Master and 18th-century British paintings from his own collection, including works by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Gainsborough and Reynolds, as an example of the ...”

“... Bardrochat, the other family house, an Arts and Crafts mansion in Ayrshire with a music room by Robert Lorimer. The genial chaos of country house life disconcerted some visitors. The photographer Lee Friedlander thought it was like ‘being in the middle of a British novel’, speculating that there were probably people who stayed the whole summer. McEwen ...”

“... Avenue that I used to frequent, as much because I was intrigued by the little old lady with a green parakeet on her shoulder who owned the place (she was reputed to be Whitehead’s daughter or niece), as because I was always in the market for a set of Conrad, Parkman or Scott. One day I went into the tiny shop just as she was saying to a small, pudgy and ...”

“... Montaigne, Thomas Browne and Congreve as well as such less remembered figures as the sea captain Robert Knox, and John Chilton, who, Macdonald speculates, was ‘probably’ the author of Voyage to the West Indies … in the year 1560. The penalty for wearing so much learning lightly was, at this midpoint in her career, to be patronised by the more severe ...”

“... detective. She seems to be cornered, and to know it. ‘Where are we going?’ she asks. ‘The Green Cat on Sultan Street,’ he says. Then she is alone on the screen. She glances forward and then to the side, pissed off and sulky. ‘I thought you didn’t like The Green Cat?’ Her voice is somehow too high, a little ...”

“... On a green hill​ above a lake in my local park in Leeds, there is a handsome stone structure. The Barrans Fountain was built by the Victorian clothing manufacturer Sir John Barran, once also the city’s mayor. He must have been a man with ambition. A building he constructed in the city centre is Moorish and beautiful, a small glimpse of Granada in the middle of West Yorkshire, though it was nothing more grand than a warehouse ...”

“... so appeared to float above glass curtain walls. It was expensively decorated, with partitions of green Tinian marble, etched glass and golden onyx that could be illuminated from within. They divided the floor like a De Stijl painting, and the interiors were sparsely furnished with thick black carpet, red drapes and Mies’s now ubiquitous Barcelona ...”

“... her: “John Peel – what? You mean the dead disc jockey?” And then I said: “Don’t you mean Robert Peel? Cos if it was John Peel, we’d all be known as Johnnies.”’ This gets a really good laugh and Jim, who is cut from rather rougher cloth than the officers from the serious and organised crime squad, develops his theme. ‘I mean, speaking of ...”

“... Lord Percy in Blackadder, whose alchemical pursuits engender not gold but a nugget of purest ‘green’, Morton had made some ‘black’.Successful alchemists tend to be fictional. Paulo Coelho’s novel The Alchemist (1988) is a meditation on following your dream. His alchemist really can turn lead into gold, using the fabled philosopher’s stone: an ...”

“... of brilliant achievement in painting’ – in the secure hands of William Orpen, Laura Knight and Robert Anning Bell. (Now that Modernism is orthodoxy, we forget how marginal its initial hold was.) When, after the war and a period of personal troubles, Sickert returned to the critical fray, he had become the genial, roguish grandfather of art, indulgently ...”

“... In April​ 1970, Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick – both aged 53, married for 21 years – had just been on holiday together in Italy with their 13-year-old daughter, Harriet. Hardwick and Harriet had come home to New York, where Hardwick taught at Barnard College; Lowell had gone to Oxford to take up a fellowship at All Souls ...”

“... than others, however much we may protest that they are merely different? For instance, does Robert Lowell’s Life Studies intrigue us more than, say, Tony Harrison’s family reminiscences in Continuous? If so, is it because Lowell’s technique is more sophisticated and fluid than Harrison’s vigorously clanking sonnet sequence in which the rhymes ...”

“... Putting on again joyously the hateful harness’. That is how Robert Pinget’s diffident and slightly dotty narrator, Monsieur Songe, describes the process of taking up his pen yet again, and adding one more to an already considerable cavalcade of novels.* Then he crosses out the word ‘hateful’. And then he crosses out the word ‘harness ...”