“... choreography broke completely with the classical conventions of ballet. Nikolai Roerich, a painter and archaeologist, believed he had unearthed evidence of human sacrifice among the ancient Scythians, and this was used as the basis of the ballet, for which he designed the costumes, styling them after peasant dress. In exile, Stravinsky laboured long ...”

“... Day-Lewis was not the only contemporary to wonder in retrospect at the Auden effect – what the painter William Coldstream called ‘a real magic and glamour in his presence’ – and shrewdly put his finger on part of it: the figure Auden cut was at once impressive and comical, as though acting out some great running joke about authority or ...”

“... It is probably as much a mistake to ask a working historian to discuss this theme as to ask a painter to give his views on aesthetics. Carr had not much more to offer than a version of Fifties progressivism: history teaches respect for the present, or, better still, the Soviet present. In places, it read like a Marxist 1066 and All That. It ...”

“... to offer – that Pope’s maternal aunt was wife to the man who was perhaps the finest English painter of the 17th century, the miniaturist Samuel Cooper; and the Life itself, illustrated by many portraits – both reproductions and verbal descriptions of the poet’s host of friends – is not unlike a collection of Augustan miniatures. Its ...”

“... chorister-hero making his high pure etherial and childish music in ‘the Cathedral Basilica of St George at Coverley, the mother church of all England and of the English Empire overseas’ – on the site of Cowley Motor Works, presumably, just outside Oxford. And when, in the last movement of the book, Hubert’s father takes him by high-speed viaducted ...”

“... twinning us with Croydon. No longer is the innocence of G. Davis affirmed in large white letters. George is certainly not OK. The obituaries are in for a life of bad timing: he was caught at the wheel of a getaway van outside the Bank of Cyprus on the Seven Sisters Road in Holloway, 16 months after his release by the home secretary on the grounds that his ...”

“... were trapped’. ‘I have two minor questions,’ she wrote. As usual, they have to do with my George Washington-handicap. I can’t tell a lie even for art, apparently; it takes an awful effort or a sudden jolt to make me alter facts. Shouldn’t it be a lobster town, and further on – where the bait, fish for bait, was trapped – (this is trivial, I ...”

“... mansion. The Clyde rises and falls only a few yards from the castle’s back door, and in 1668 Sir George Maxwell sold eighteen acres of riparian land to the city of Glasgow, which thought it was a useful site for a harbour. Shoals and shallows above that point in the river made Glasgow inaccessible to sea-going ships; they usually transferred their cargoes at ...”

“... teacher and speaker; stylist and rhetorician; lyricist and word-artist; translator and linguist; painter and botanist. For Luxemburg, letter writing was a daily task (there are 2350 letters in the first five volumes of the Gesammelte Briefe). It was, one feels reading this collection, the way she spoke to others and to herself. She was also a ...”

“... jerks’, joining notorious loudmouths of the era such as the New York Yankees’ bullying owner George Steinbrenner (another Roy Cohn client). From the Bronx to the Battery, opinion on Trump set as hard as the cement on his construction sites and as fast as he had ordered underpaid Polish immigrant construction workers in 1980 to jackhammer the Art Deco ...”

“... pardons the renegade. In 2003 Lenny Bruce received a posthumous pardon for his conviction from George Pataki, then governor of New York. And in 2005 the Library of America started publishing Roth’s work in a uniform edition. It wasn’t the first time a living author’s work had been honoured in this way: Eudora Welty and Saul Bellow went before ...”