“... with which Webster opens her book could as easily have been plucked from wartime discourse. Walter White, the leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, claimed that African Americans tended to be well received in Britain, which he attributed to the fact that ‘black GIs, unlike their white compatriots, did not consider ...”

“... is the description of the ancient Scottish seat of the Roman Catholic earls of Glenallan in Walter Scott’s The Antiquary. The late Countess, ‘partly from a haughty contempt of the times in which she lived, partly from her sense of family pride’, had not permitted the interiors to be modernised. The ‘valuable collection of pictures’, which hung ...”

“... with a group of US fiction writers around his age that includes the late David Foster Wallace, George Saunders, Jonathan Franzen and Jeffrey Eugenides. There are a few things that set Antrim apart: he’s Southern; his strongest affinity to a writer in the previous generation is to Donald Barthelme, not Don DeLillo; he’s the least likely to be ...”

“... medievalist who saw the ‘life of forms’ as an almost autonomous force in art, and the American George Kubler, an expert in pre-Columbian artefacts for whom the Panofskyan emphasis on individual style, strict chronology and iconographic analysis (the hunting for sources of images in documents) was not helpful in a field where known artists, exact dates and ...”

“... to the avowedly nostalgic John Betjeman. Likewise, we get no more than a brief sidelong glimpse of George Orwell. So be it. Let’s say that Harris’s concern is with a certain strand of artistic production, rather than with an overarching historical narrative. She has chosen Romantic Moderns as her title because she believes that in all her favourite work of ...”

“... born in the West Country in 1683, and in an early publication he implicitly claimed descent from Walter Curll, the Royalist Bishop of Winchester before the city fell to Cromwell in 1645. The truth may have been more prosaic, but like much else Curll’s background remains obscure. The main source for his early life is a malevolent biography by an ...”

“... his pastoral scenes à la Claud Lovat Fraser and Chelsea set subjects such as ‘The Thief’ from Walter de la Mare’s Peacock Pie, for which he drew a kidnapper with a sackful of kiddies prancing past wigwam mountains and silhouette trees. Burra probably attended de la Mare’s lecture on ‘Atmosphere in Fiction’ at the Royal College of Art in April ...”

“... down the second law of thermodynamics? . . . The matchless incandescent spirit of the man!’ Walter Benjamin thought a philosophy that couldn’t account for fortune-telling by means of coffee grounds couldn’t be a real philosophy. Many have thought just the reverse, of course. One mention of coffee grounds and the like, and we are no longer talking ...”

“... navigable aqueduct in Britain: the oldest, highest and longest. ‘The stream in the sky’, as Walter Scott called it, at Pontcysyllte on the Llangollen Canal, is also attributed to Telford, though with the active collaboration of the more senior engineer William Jessop and the ironmaster William Hazledine. It consists of an iron trough supported on arched ...”

“... Federal Republic as the epitome of a comfortable German modernism, far less edgy than Otto Dix, George Grosz or Max Beckmann, let alone the wild men of the 1970s and 1980s such as Joseph Beuys or Anselm Kiefer.It helped that Hitler’s personal distaste for Nolde’s work is well attested. His paintings featured prominently in the exhibition of degenerate ...”

“... then. The Shakespearean parallels offer a fittingly British version of enchantment. It’s as if George Eliot tried to write Middlemarch now and realised that the realist novel isn’t up to it in the 21st century. You can’t draw together into a single narrative an island culture wholly recalcitrant to unity. But Eliot/Smith thinks: wait! Late romance! We ...”

“... and art, together with studies of history, music and literature. She was influenced by the work of Walter Pater, and by her friendships with Henry James, Robert Browning and John Singer Sargent. But she was never swayed to the extent that she relinquished her intellectual independence. An atheist and materialist, she had no time for contemporary flirtations ...”

“... people in many other categories were and are routinely stripped of rights. Heller-Roazen refers to George Orwell, who in ‘How the Poor Die’ recounted his treatment as an indigent ‘specimen’ in a charity hospital in France in 1921, and to the sociologist Erving Goffman, whose dissertation in 1953 concerned the ‘civil inattention’ practised on ...”

“... wasn’t soft duty: he left Greece only a couple of days before the bullet-ridden body of his pal George Polk, he of the other eponymous journalism award, was found in Salonika Bay.‘Mile for mile, cablegram for cablegram, there probably isn’t a foreign correspondent in the business who covers a wider beat, and covers it harder,’ Newsweek wrote of Sparks ...”

“... through a person, as Heidi had. The tighty-whities were what had unlocked it for her. Cranston – Walter White in Breaking Bad – standing with his legs spread against that desert background, his head full of chemical equations. To write for someone’s capabilities, or even just a little beyond them. He would be perfect, Heidi said. It would be ...”