“... than the Bog of Allen will ever care or know, that there was once a painter in Ireland called Jack Butler Yeats. Like McGreevy, Beckett was fascinated by Jack Yeats; in these letters Yeats the painter is almost alone among living Irish figures of the previous generation whom Beckett mentions with constant respect. In 1930, McGreevy wrote of Beckett to Jack ...”

“... escapades or of other people’s bad behaviour, a favourite being how, after a performance in John Osborne’s A Patriot for Me at Chichester for which he had been much praised, Alan was sitting in his dressing-room when there was a tentative knock on the door. It was Alec Guinness. He shook Alan’s hand, said, ‘You must be very tired,’ and ...”

“... as a poet has been doubtful or negligible. This is a position firmly summarised in Marilyn Butler’s handbook, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries (1981). She argues that the only Coleridge to pause over is the man whose ‘really significant or at least influential career was as a moulder of opinion’ – that is, as a political journalist. His ...”

“... of her first novel behind her, Bedford got a contract to write an entire book about the trial of John Bodkin Adams – the Harold Shipman of his time – at the Old Bailey that year. The book begins with the judge’s entrance, ‘trailing a wake of subtlety, of secret powers, age’ and ends three and a half weeks later with the not guilty verdict. In ...”

“... a body modification technology,’ as Lewis puts it, in the footsteps of Gayle Rubin and Judith Butler: the home, the wedding ring, even the binary sexuation, are only there by convention, honoured – or not – by time. ‘Natural’ childbirth, with pools and music and aromatic midwives, is ‘a regimen full of carefully stylised gestational labour hacks ...”

“... Slater and Maya Slater, prompts us to ask again: ‘What is Tourguéneffish?’ Edmund Wilson, John Bayley and others have made the point that Turgenev in the original is more ‘textured’, modulated and idiomatic (‘He is interested in words,’ Wilson wrote, ‘in a way that the other great 19th-century Russian novelists – with the exception of ...”

“... the impulse to take charge. She allowed herself to be persuaded by her cabinet secretary, Robin Butler, that it was too dangerous for the prime minister’s office to appear to be setting the terms of the dispute. She remained reliant on her energy secretary, Peter Walker, whom she didn’t trust and feared would do ‘a fudge, like Pym and the Foreign ...”

“... start of the operation to ask what they thought its legacy would be. Not one – not Labour’s John Reid, now Baron Reid of Cardowan, or Des Browne, now Baron Browne of Ladyton, or John Hutton, now Baron Hutton of Furness, or Bob Ainsworth, or the Conservatives’ Philip Hammond or Liam Fox – was prepared to ...”

“... 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 conclusion. A felt kinship with Whitman was fairly predictable for a gay writer at the time; in ...”

“... won admirers among the black writers who emerged during the Black Power era, such as LeRoi Jones, John A. Williams and Ishmael Reed. And his legacy now? As Jackson writes, ‘history has borne out some of his vinegary judgments.’ Today, Himes’s belief in the implacable force of white supremacism – what is now called Afro-pessimism – enjoys a growing ...”

“... a loyal readership across the political spectrum (his admirers include Emmanuel Macron and Judith Butler), and his concepts – the postcolony, necropolitics, Afropolitanism and more – crop up everywhere from the Venice Biennale to newspapers and advertising briefs. It is perhaps surprising that such widespread acclaim has been given to a writer who is ...”

“... Oxford who caused him concern’: he believed him to be his illegitimate brother. Her grandfather John Horatio Lloyd had, in the 1830s, ‘exposed himself in the Temple Gardens’ and run ‘naked in the sight of some nursemaids’, thus losing the opportunity to become solicitor-general. He ‘was forced to retire from political and legal work for four ...”

“... a woman to redeem her sexual transgression has. In Much Ado about Nothing, Claudio is told by Don John on the eve of his wedding that Hero has been unfaithful to him: ‘It would better fit your honour to change your mind.’ Wrongly accused at the ceremony, Hero faints to the ground, apparently dead. When she revives, her father, Leonato, exclaims: Do not ...”

“... my father, the Chinese Maritime Customs. But this work, much of it from the distinguished hand of John Fairbank, was mostly concerned with the 19th-century origins of the institution, shedding less light on modern times. For its more recent history, it was not even very clear where the records lay: the best contemporary guide to Chinese archives, produced in ...”