“... down her chance to paint Pope Pius VI because she didn’t believe she could do herself justice wearing the obligatory veil, but Goodden thinks she was fibbing and was never offered the commission. In Naples she enthused about the bay and the volcano and painted (among many others) Emma Hamilton, whom she dressed in smocks and shawls and whose off-the-cuff ...”

“... Holocaust since the end of the 1980s (the first intifada), and its return into Hebrew literature (David Grossman’s See under: Love). The Holocaust is part of the victim imagery, hence the madness of state-subsidised school trips to Auschwitz. This has less to do with understanding the past than with reproducing an environment in which we exist in the ...”

“... which jumped around all over the place when he talked – which was a great deal of the time’. David Gascoyne described in his journal in 1936 how Jennings dominated a meeting of the English Surrealists, ‘as usual … boiling over with energy and excitement’. He reported, too, the scene when Jennings and Tom Harrisson met to discuss the formation of ...”

“... radio station is gonna play this crap?’).The album ended up in the hands of a young David Toop. Unspooling its peculiarly effective mixture of sideshow fraudulence, oneiric hokum and deeply coded, deadly serious New Orleans folklore on a mono Dansette in a friend’s bedroom – a device that was hardly up to deciphering ‘the eccentricities of ...”

“... in a delicate copperplate hand, ‘The daughter of Admiral Walker’, followed by a signature: ‘David Wilkie f-t 1840’. Near her there used to hang another portrait, of a fantastical fellow in a high tarbush with a long, dangling plume, his chest puffed out in his dress uniform, with prominent epaulettes, medals at his throat and a long scimitar cradled ...”

“... has a partner. Natsu and Makiko’s father disappeared during their childhood. ‘He was always wearing the same stained tank top and longjohns and lounging on his futon, a permanent fixture of the room.’ Her sister’s husband also ran off, leaving her to raise her daughter on her own. Men are hangers-on, absconders, wet blankets, quiet admonishers. At ...”

“... part of the journey was behind him. He sent her some photos, which she forwarded to me. He is wearing a Barcelona FC shirt, a pair of shorts over leggings and Crocs: not really appropriate gear for hiking through one of the most inhospitable regions on the American continent.Ngu and his cousin had to borrow money from other Cameroonians to fund the rest ...”

“... Christian martyrs, monks, Abelard and Héloïse, the troubadours, Dante. Next she moves on to David Hume, Goethe, Byron, Casanova, before concluding with a smattering of Netflix scripts and YouTube comments. Is this a history of love? Or a history of certain ideas about love? As the historian of China Eugenia Lean has argued, the ‘single ...”

“... but he was extremely reluctant to show himself in any state of undress, and insisted on Frieda wearing calico bloomers he had run up himself when she bathed in Mexico. Sprawson speculates that it was to assert her sexual freedom that Frieda, while on honeymoon with Lawrence, swam naked across an Austrian river, Hero to an unknown Leander, to offer herself ...”

“... function requires the articulation of that field to focus in the central vertical.’ David Rosand continues to elaborate this platitude, finally arriving at an absurd hyperbole: ‘What we might call the iconic imperative of the altarpiece enforces that centrality of focus; the lateral forces of the field operate centripetally, with reference to ...”

“... wanted a new dress and, when she was told her old dress was pretty good, replied: ‘I cannot be wearing it for Occasions.’ She was obviously translating her thought directly from the Yoruba (‘occasions’ meaning parties, festivals, ceremonies), but Don Bloch’s rather monotonous use of constructions like ‘was having’ or ‘could be ...”

“... and especially after Mubarak’s thugs – armed with grenades, knives and petrol bombs, some wearing pro-Mubarak T-shirts that seemed to have been designed for the occasion – charged through Tahrir Square on 2 February on horses and camels, the regime’s face was revealed: coarse, brutal, an unwitting parody of Orientalist clichés. Newspapers not ...”

“... Cambridge baths), and governed now – as they probably always were – by fierce rules about the wearing of properly concealing swimwear; modern imitation of the ancient Romans rarely embraces nude bathing. Here our ‘bewildered stranger’ immediately runs into trouble when he fails to spot that there are segregated changing rooms; had it not been for the ...”

“... Roger Williamson was burned to death at Zandvoort in 1973, while his friend and fellow driver David Purley tried desperately to beat out the flames as millions of TV viewers watched, Lauda was asked by the press why he hadn’t stopped to help. ‘I’m paid to race,’ he said, ‘not to stop.’ The ‘formula’ of F1 refers to the various rules ...”

“... functional harmony’. Hooked up to machines, he clings to every instance of the human: the nurse wearing pins that indicate she’s queer (‘everyone else had seemed so relentlessly heterosexual’); the orderly who gently strokes his ankle. His favourite nurse is named Alivia, the Spanish word for ‘relief’. He is at once special – ‘an ER doctor’s ...”