“... his diary: ‘The peeresses en bloc the most ravishing sight – like a bed of auricula-eyed sweet william.’) The photographs he took later that day at the palace include some stiff and unsurprising tableaux involving queen and consort, assorted cousins and ladies-in-waiting. But there are echoes of the early work’s graphic brio: Princess Anne, nearly ...”

“... novel that Sasnal started to get noticed ten years ago. Blowing up Spiegelman’s black and white frames with their captions removed, Sasnal nudged at the story’s grim content with the tersest of signifiers. One way, this was a quizzical take on the notion that painting might report on history: another, it was a fan’s tribute handiwork. So much in ...”

“... separating from its bound pages. Beth Gibbons sings the play’s last lines – ‘lyrics by William Shakespeare’, the acknowledgment reads – with their plea for mercy and indulgence: And my ending is despair Unless I be relieved by prayer, Which pierces so that it assaults Mercy itself, and frees all faults. As you from crimes would pardoned ...”

“... Camargue hat, tumbling tie once black, rimless monocle on a black ribbon, a Van Dyck beard so white it looks dyed. In all so distinguished a figure that some Wamps wag once said of him that when he comes shambling along to the club the very dogs in the street stop smelling one another and bow to him. And then, that Olympian name! Removed from fame by a ...”

“... merely a quarter of a fifth of those so far available, but one would not want the volume longer. William Walton is no prose stylist, not much of an anecdotalist, and his letters reveal remarkably little about him. They are nearly always utilitarian – money, advice, favours to be sought, contracts to be finalised, parts to be corrected, a libretto to be ...”

“... what a falling off was there!’ exclaimed the caricaturist Paul Pry, showing the Duke in his white trousers alighting on horse dung. But the diarist Creevey says the top-heavy hero was ‘immensely cheered’ by thousands. After all, lusty young troopers were sometimes unhorsed in this fashion. It was an age of military dandyism like no other. Was ...”

“... Cold Warrior, once canvassed for the arch-conservative Barry Goldwater and interned in the Nixon White House. He made his career talking up threats from Iran, North Korea and Venezuela to fill the void left by the Soviet Union. He has consistently urged US policymakers to take the hardest possible line, up to and including military action, even as such ...”

“... broken between 1981 and 1986, was back in force: whichever party nominally controls the White House, the Democrats run Capitol Hill. In consequence, the politics of divided power provide the customary political condition for Republican Presidents. Reagan’s first six years were the exception to the rule of the last 32 – and even then the ...”

“... saw her in terms of ‘belongings in apple-pie order, labelled, folded, scented and camphored’, white damask napkins and ‘the heavy white china plates she always got from Antinori in Rome’. Lovers may have noticed these things too, more than their owner perhaps, as is implied in the very svelte poem called ‘Notes on ...”

“... roads along which herds and flocks travelled from Aberdeenshire to southern trysts and marts; the white blaze where scree pours down a mountainside from a gap in a solid crag; the slowly vanishing wake left by a liner among the flying fish of the Arabian Sea. These books are preoccupied with the highly conscious enjoyment of wild country, although both ...”

“... figures became our familiar louche aristocrats and sapphic seductresses, most notably in John William Polidori’s The Vampyre (the other story written during that famous summer on Lake Geneva in 1816), Keats’s ‘Lamia’, Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’ and Le Fanu’s Carmilla. Groom calls Dracula a ‘brilliant culmination’ and ‘gamechanger’ of ...”

“... learned to talk straight from the shoulder, although Buckoke’s is slightly hunched under the white man’s burden and Kapuściński’s is often set to the wheel of invention, which makes much of his plain speaking deceptive. Only Blaine Harden keeps a respectable posture throughout and can even be quite sanguine in adversity – mostly other ...”

“... was surprised to come upon a sustained and in my view immoderate onslaught on the late Eric Walter White, who, during Goodman’s chairmanship, was Literature Director at the Arts Council and its much admired organiser of festivals. I worked with White for some years, and he was certainly a strange and almost risibly ...”

“... larger than life in an Administration that was not overflowing with such personalities. His White House experience made him ultra-sensitive to any sign of that being done unto him which he had done unto others. He never hesitated to show his disdain for those who he felt deserved it, especially the Secretary of Defence, Cap Weinberger, here the target ...”

“... as a transcriber at her local Green Party office and the rest of the week as a childminder for the white, upper-middle-class Chamberlain family. In making Emira work for a political party that makes almost no impression in a decidedly two-party country, Reid is telling us something about Emira’s marginal career prospects. She watches her friends achieve the ...”