“... When​ T.S. Eliot asked John Hayward in February 1938 to act as his literary executor (‘in case some unexpected calamity cuts me down like a flower’), he told him to prevent publication of his literary remains – including ‘any letters at all of any intimacy to anybody’. ‘In fact,’ he added, ‘I have a mania for posthumous privacy ...”

“... in the 1990s was self-imposed. But as Georgina Born makes clear in her definitive analysis of the John Birt and Greg Dyke eras, the consistent impetus came from government. It’s no surprise that Margaret Thatcher wanted to take on the BBC – if anything, the surprise is how long it took her. (In her first ...”

“... or ‘neo-authoritarian’, what is indisputable is that it has unleashed what John Ganz has called a sense of ‘moral anarchy’, in which there are no longer any limits to the expression of sadism, or to its implementation as policy. Children are forcibly separated from their parents. Migrants from Venezuela are flown to a concentration ...”

“... MacArthur won his many medals – relatively brief exposures, with MacArthur picking when they took place, buoyed by adrenalin and his public role – more closely resembles the courage needed by the war correspondents by whom he was usually surrounded in the field. A different kind, seldom recognised by medals or publicity, is asked of those who, when ...”

“... The trial​ of Argentina’s military leaders took place in Buenos Aires between April and September 1985. The court heard evidence against the nine most senior figures in the regime, including three former presidents – Videla, Viola and Galtieri. Sittings began each day in the early afternoon and often went on until after midnight ...”

“... adopted, I was spared the binding notion of blood, with all its passion and fatalism. I simply took the platitude and stood it on its head. I am no longer sure what to think, except that this interest in origins is a perversity on my part, like going back over a dispute that was settled years ago. Doubly perverse because of my debt to water. I owe nothing ...”

“... health’ when Johnson first came to Streatham after the Thrales found him ‘on his knees before John Delap, an Anglican clergyman and minor playwright, “beseeching God to continue him in the use of his understanding”’ in terms so ‘pathetic’ that Henry Thrale ‘involuntarily lifted up one hand to shut his mouth, from provocation at hearing a man ...”

“... of children and naifs). In the end Debord views St Cobra as a forerunner, an artistic St John to the political SI, a pivot to launch Situationism, which should be presented, he writes early on to Jorn, as ‘the necessary transcendence of that era’. However, Situationism as such does not emerge very distinctly in these letters, largely because, in ...”

“... celebrity Axel Munthe. His extraordinary memoir, The Story of San Michele, was published by John Murray in 1929, when Munthe was 72. The first edition rapidly sold out; it went into its 20th impression in January 1931, and has been in print ever since.* The reasons for its wide and enduring appeal have to do partly with its subject-matter – Munthe led ...”

“... to death. ‘Woman with a Cafetière’ (c.1895) It is not at all clear when the idea took root that Cézanne, when he painted, didn’t care about his subjects as people, as individuals. But for most of the 20th century it was dogma. By the 1950s, when Meyer Schapiro wrote his great book about Cézanne, he knew that the judgment would be on ...”

“... translations of both works: of the first by Sylvia Townsend Warner in 1958, of the second by John Sturrock in 1988. The English titles rather elegantly contradict one another. Sturrock’s is literal and exact: Against Sainte-Beuve. Townsend Warner’s is more allusive and less quarrelsome: By Way of Sainte-Beuve. Sturrock calls her title ...”

“... of – like life itself. I now realise that I was only able to capture something of the Reverend John Murgatroyd’s feelings, his ‘enthusiastic tenderness’, for his servant’s little bastard daughter in my book Master and Servant because that passage has been in my mind for fifty years. ‘Oh, the pea!’ I have said to myself countless ...”

“... of the term, slotting it between ‘guilty quotation marks’ throughout the issue. Designed by John Piper (with whom Myfanwy was living at Fawley Bottom, a rundown farmhouse in Oxfordshire), Axis was crisp and modern, with sans-serif lettering and experimental prose. But Myfanwy’s refusal to pin down abstraction infuriated the artists. In what Maclean ...”

“... respectively. Siegfried’s funeral march was played at a concert marking Lenin’s death. It took Operation Barbarossa to kill off Wagner’s operas in Stalinist Russia.Progressive readings​ of Wagner have foundered on some ugly truths. Most notorious is his contribution to the literature of antisemitism with ‘On Jewishness in Music’, published ...”

“... a rhinestone dog-collar.’ He was responding to Auden’s admonition on reading O’Hara’s and John Ashbery’s entries for the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 1955: ‘I think you (and John, too, for that matter) must watch what is always the great danger with any “surrealistic” style, namely of confusing authentic ...”