“... when, invited to choose the galleries for his show, he had insisted that they include the towering hall down the middle of the Tate, an absolute graveyard for sculpture. As to the purpose of the improvised studio, it was much more specific than Lord realises. It was needed for the making of new versions in plaster of the figurines in Four figurines on a tall ...”

“... Parliament had been rejected, he exhibited two of his massive historical paintings in the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly. The public flocked to the building, but to see the midget, General Tom Thumb, who was being shown downstairs. On the first day Haydon attracted only four visitors. ‘I would not have believed it of the English people,’ he wrote in his ...”

“... with a larger-than-door-sized opening to the living room – a reversion in planning terms to the hall as main room, not entrance passage. I knew this pattern from American movies about suburban life, but assumed it was a cinema-designer’s device, a kind of stage set, not real architecture. Halle relates planning conventions like these to changes in ...”

“... interest’ turns by Christopher ‘Superman’ Reeve and the semi-paralysed gunshot victim, James Brady – were considered insufficient by Clinton and Morris. With all the media present in Chicago, they feared that the American public would still receive too much information about the delegates, and their mostly very liberal views. Clinton and Morris ...”

“... after his death in 1930, a medium enabled him to make a sold-out appearance at the Royal Albert Hall. Years later, his children still chose their cars on the basis of which?-style advice from their dead father (in life, one of the first drivers to be fined for speeding). During World War Two, Vichyite psychics joined forces with a London medium and a ...”

“... Conrad but does little to characterise him as a writer.At the Architectural Review in the 1930s, James Richards had found editing Pevsner’s articles hard work. By the end of the war he was fluent, but his use of English retains a sense of discovery and the flexibility of a mature intellect expressing itself with the vitality of youth. Pevsner was still ...”

“... which he established in Vincent Square in 1826 under the guidance of the educationalist James Buchanan, and where his daughter was enrolled. Buchanan’s childlike imagination and simplicity instilled in Bodichon and many other pupils an awareness of the natural world and the beauty of music and art. In 1849, aged 22, she began attending the ...”

“... On​ 2 November 1921, James Joyce wrote from Paris to his aunt Josephine in Dublin asking if it was ‘possible for an ordinary person to climb over the area railings of No. 7 Eccles Street, either from the path or the steps, lower himself from the lowest part of the railings till his feet are within 2 feet or 3 off the ground and drop unhurt ...”

“... was a bare three years since the first Jacobite Rising had attempted to place the Old Pretender, James Edward Stuart, on the throne, and although the Murrays were well-known Jacobites, the family was well enough connected to ensure that, when he reached London, William was able to enter Westminster School and then Christ Church, Oxford, at both of which he ...”

“... a more and more prominent part of the décor. Misia and Diaghilev presided over the gala in the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles in 1923. The parties grew ever more enormous but the old innocence drained away. When Balanchine auditioned for Diaghilev – in Misia’s apartment, naturally – Diaghilev’s days were already numbered. By this time Sert and Misia ...”

“... Ukip and the Scottish National Party have shown that movement politics is capable of entering city hall peacefully and passionately.There is a further problem, which Lilla sidesteps: the awkward issue of identity politics in the age of globalisation. If you frame ‘identity politics’ as a self-indulgent distraction from the vital business of creating a ...”

“... the Pekinese flower face for which the cloche hat was designed (see Shepard’s illustration to ‘James James Morrison Morrison’), and they were very much in love. And so, to outward appearances, they remained. Did Kenneth Grahame, who also supported a fairly enigmatic marriage, write The Wind in the Willows for his little boy as a result? Milne turned ...”

“... of cases. George Eliot can do nothing with a Dorothea Brooke married to the man she loves. Henry James has to fix up Isabel and leave her in the most exalted stasis of all: being a perfect lady in her misfortune. What it comes to is that male authors present a woman as a ‘case’. In the Classics she is a tableau, like patience on a monument; in the ...”

“... utopian Philological Society, based at the University of London, the amazing sticktoitiveness of James Murray, editor and mastermind of the project from 1879 to his death in 1915, and the (initially) nervous patron, OUP, who inherited the project 22 year after its launch. Willinsky tells much the same story as that given by Elisabeth Murray (Caught in the ...”

“... of a heavy industry in academia. Ireland is a small nation – ‘an afterthought of Europe’, as James Joyce put it – and marginality is much in vogue at the moment. Yet it is also home to a magnificent body of literature, much of it written with wonderful convenience in the world’s premier language, and so easily accessible from Tokyo to Bogotá. Being ...”