“... a constant flow of adrenaline, taxis, drinks, an opening at the Museum of Modern Art, a party at a painter’s loft, poems written on the run between the San Remo bar and the New York City Ballet.’ To show what makes O’Hara more than just a diarist of a particularly fertile Bohemia would be to show how his poems work, why they sound as they do. Marjorie ...”

“... had been treated unjustly. She had sailed from England in July 1838, following her marriage to George Maclean, a military officer stationed in the Gold Coast, whom she married, her friends believed, mainly to escape the scandalous rumours which increasingly surrounded her. From 1825 or 1826 until her departure in 1838, tales circulated of her supposed ...”

“... darker comedy out of a related exchange, in which a Daisy Miller-like heroine who aspires to be a painter tours a Roman gallery with a successful writer and art critic, while dismissing in succession the merits of a Raphael double portrait, a Sebastian del Piombo, a Velázquez, two Claude Lorrains and a Memling. In that story, the writer finally proposes ...”

“... John Jeffries, Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier and James Sadler, the balloonists; in King George III, who loved telescopes and music and balloons; in Thomas Beddoes, the doctor, and his Pneumatic Institute, and his wife, Anna; in Michael Faraday, the physicist; in Charles Babbage, the mathematician and inventor of the difference engine; in ...”

“... Made’ (a reference to the weaselly ‘past exonerative’ tense popularised by Richard Perle and George W. Bush among others), which fits the scheme, but doesn’t wholly convince. Franzen has gone for the thematically resonant joke at the expense of the character. Would Patty really title her cri de coeur, which doesn’t attempt in any way to dodge ...”

“... as if she too was plugged into the ‘immense réservoir d’électricité’ described in ‘The Painter of Modern Life’. ‘The main duty of the poet,’ Tonks declared, ‘is to excite – to send the senses reeling,’ but hyper-receptivity often seems like a cross she had to bear. In one of her poems, she is a ‘zoophyte’ ‘sponging up ...”

“... her eyes are dead and she wears the strained smile of a woman who really wants to tell the painter to bugger off. One critic said perceptively that she appeared ‘weary of being looked at’. Another that the portrait might pass muster as the cover of a Catherine Cookson novel: an opinion I find thought-provoking, as Cookson’s simple tales of poor ...”

“... the always dependable Shakespeare and Michelangelo, Whitman, Marlowe and Henry Scott Tuke, the painter of bathing boys. Three or four are mere suspects, followed by question marks: Samuel Butler? Luca Signorelli? Forster had presumably seen those great paeans to the male buttocks, Signorelli’s frescoes in Orvieto cathedral, and come to an irresistible ...”

“... final version of The Dunciad. I have heard Mr Richardson relate that he attended his father the painter on a visit, when one of Cibber’s pamphlets came into the hands of Pope, who said, ‘These things are my diversion.’ They sat by him while he perused it, and saw his features writhen with anguish; and young Mr Richardson said to his father, when they ...”

“... to Europe. He worked for a time in the studio of John La Farge and might have become a talented painter; he went with Louis Agassiz on a scientific expedition to the Amazon; he received a degree in medicine from Harvard, where, despite his abhorrence of laboratory work and mostly to please his father, he instructed in anatomy and physiology, until at ...”

“... the house. Anne had trained at the Queen’s Square Female School of Art as a screen and furniture painter. Charlotte had been trained for nothing, so she wrote. She wrote slowly, and, like the heroine of New Grub Street, did her time in the British Museum Reading Room, grinding articles (‘The Governess in Fiction’, ‘Mary Stuart in Fiction’) out of ...”

“... white-clad American would never take such risks with her behaviour, clothing or portrait-painter. The white female garments in another of James’s stories from the mid-1880s are wholly anti-seductive, even austere. ‘The Author of Beltraffio’ is narrated by a young American obsessed with an English writer who is famous for a novel expounding the ...”

“... dalliances, one of them with the artist and writer Valentine Dobrée, a former lover of the painter Mark Gertler and now the wife of Eliot’s friend Bonamy Dobrée. Aldington fantasised about Valentine in a long poem that lacks intensity despite its exclamation marks: ‘Why cannot we be wise like the Epicureans/Who thought not of possession but of ...”

“... punctuated by bouts of ill-health and thoughts of suicide. Having renounced his ambition to be a painter, he had devoted himself, intermittently, to the pursuit of chemistry, comparative anatomy and physiology; enrolled in Harvard Medical School; abandoned medicine to accompany Louis Agassiz on a zoological expedition to Brazil; returned to medical school ...”

“... the high aristocracy from the toppled Austro-Hungarian Empire, as well as artists like the Russian painter Marc Chagall.’ In the song ‘Alma’ – written soon after her obituaries appeared in December 1964 – Tom Lehrer imagines all modern women being jealous of her ‘for bagging Gustav and Walter and Franz’. How did she do it? At first, at least, she ...”