“... dismissed (which is pretty much Norman Lamont’s career in a nutshell). Later in the century, Richard FitzNeal, first as dean of Lincoln and latterly as bishop of London, continued in his day job in the church while moonlighting as treasurer ” for an apparently unbroken forty years. It’s as though Jim Callaghan were now preparing to leave 11 Downing ...”

“... of 1726. This was all but ready in 1984, when Whitman died. Meanwhile, a definitive biography by Richard Westfall, publication of Newton’s correspondence and, decisively, a Cambridge edition of his mathematical papers were all completed. The new translation makes use of this scholarship. It opens with another introduction by Cohen, occupying more than a ...”

“... jacket and white foustanella, hand on hip, legs apart, a scimitar at his side. This is Major Richard Church of the British-funded 1st Regiment Greek Light Infantry, as painted in 1813 by Denis Dighton. At the time, he was commanding Greek soldiers he had recruited to fight against Napoleon. He subsequently left the British army and, after a stint as the ...”

“... music away in the cloisters.’Even those cloisters had not been encouraging. Sydney Smith, a canon of St Paul’s from 1831 until his death in 1845, complained that ‘it is enough if our music is decent … we are here to pray, and the singing is a very subordinate consideration.’ Churches of most denominations proceed along those lines to ...”

“... in an art gallery but at the Arsenal cinema. Goldin reveres Visconti, Antonioni, Cassavetes, Jack Smith. Her images – I’m thinking of a self-portrait at a window, in which she has a curl at the nape of her neck and scratches on her exposed back – form part of an autobiographical narrative, one that reveals in order to keep battling against denial and ...”

“... name?’ ‘I know your name is …’ I don’t remember it today, but let’s say he was called Smith. ‘Don’t say that aloud!’ ‘I know your city, I know your family, I know details!’ Actually, all I knew was his name and his city. ‘Who told you this?’ ‘I won’t say. But one day I’m gonna go home and then you’ll see.’ He started ...”

“... Rothko backed away from him, but Pollock and Reinhardt stood fast, along with the sculptor Tony Smith (Pollock and Smith had helped Newman install the second show), and he had the powerful support of Greenberg. But not Rosenberg, at least not yet. In December 1952 Rosenberg published his most impactful essay, ‘The ...”

“... but none in a way that is easy to interpret. Perhaps the very act of bombing from a plane – what Richard Eberhart called ‘The Fury of Aerial Bombardment’, the gap between, in J.M. Synge’s phrase, ‘a gallous story and a dirty deed’ – made it impossible for anyone, including Yeats in ‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’, a poem which seems to ...”

“... belonging to Henrietta Roberts (later Dombey), the daughter of Michael Roberts and Janet Adam Smith. What occasioned Rupert’s interest was his having been to look at a very grand house for his magazine (World of Interiors), the expensive decoration of which included several Ben Nicholsons. This reminded me that over the fireplace in the very rundown ...”

“... at least until Peaky Blinders came along? In my experience, nobody, not even Oswald Mosley or Richard Nixon, was capable of radiating such unease in company. Harold Macmillan couldn’t stand having Powell opposite him in cabinet looking ‘like Savonarola eyeing one of the more disreputable popes’. So he relocated Enoch way down the table where he ...”

“... an Arriva bus and quits Leeds via Hunslet, which also appears more or less obliterated since Richard Hoggart, who described its working-class culture so memorably in The Uses of Literacy, grew up there. Next comes Woodlesford, where McKie gazes round for any trace of the rhubarb for which the place was once well known, and we chug onwards to ...”

“... was bestowed still the greatest honour that could have come my way.15 February. Good reviews for Richard Wilson’s production of Sarah Kane’s Blasted at Sheffield. In such a violent play, though, I find myself spiked by my literalness (as I remember being by Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking). If a character is mutilated on stage, blinded, say, or ...”

“... are the Wrong Notebooks. The same could be said of the Diaries of Emma published in facsimile by Richard Taylor, and containing memoranda of four holidays the Hardys took abroad, starting with their honeymoon. When Emma died in 1912 Hardy read not only the haunting Some Recollections describing her childhood and the Cornish romance with her husband but what ...”

“... with government – over minimum standards for all council housing. And although I see that both Richard Haslam and Jonah Jones credit him with authorship of the splendidly rude, punchy, near-libellous DIA Cautionary Guide to St Alban’s (1929), I am surprised that some credit doesn’t also go to what is surely the echo of that same ...”

“... In 1979, in a preface to a new edition of Yeats: The Man and the Masks, Richard Ellmann wrote about 46 Palmerston Road in Rathmines in Dublin, where George Yeats lived between her husband’s death in 1939 and her own death almost thirty years later. Mrs Yeats lived, Ellmann wrote, among the dead poet’s papers. ‘There in the bookcases was his working library, often heavily annotated, and in cabinets and file cases were all his manuscripts, arranged with care … She was very good at turning up at once some early draft of a poem or play or prose work, or a letter Yeats had received or written ...”