“... Tower at the novel’s opening, and who was based on Samuel Chenevix Trench, whom Oliver St John Gogarty (the model for Mulligan) met in Oxford. Chenevix Trench, Gogarty and young Joyce had lived in the Martello Tower at Sandycove in September 1904. Haines will always be the ‘ponderous Saxon … bursting with money and indigestion’, the ...”

“... him as an apostle.) The 18th-century engraver George Vertue wrote a book about Thomas Simon; John Evelyn referred to him in Numismata, his discourse on medals, seals and coins. These objects, Evelyn wrote, ‘are the most lasting and vocal monuments of antiquity’. Proof, evidence and art are all involved, and in the 17th century proving who you said ...”

“... is a founding text of contemporary cookbook-writing, or Fergus Henderson, whose St John restaurants trained many of London’s newish wave of serious chefs – and to his and Gill’s generation of restaurant critics, the transgressive has become familiar. He’s not unaware of this, of course, and so, for the first time in his career, tries to ...”

“... history of the screenplay is complicated, and it seems clear that Orson Welles, Mankiewicz and John Houseman all had a hand in it. Mankiewicz signed a contract that meant he would receive payment for his work but not get a credit; later, he managed to get his name, along with Welles’s, on screen. The film’s single Oscar went to both of them. They had ...”

“... writers believe too much in what they believe,’ she once told me – as well as what John Lanchester once identified as a ‘Russian horror of clarity’. It’s not that she doesn’t like clear prose, it’s just that she prefers it when writers don’t use that prose to know, in advance of knowing, what they think about everything, or to ...”

“... Enola as part athlete, part scholar, part judo expert, and entire rebel. (One of her set texts was John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women.) However, 16 years were enough, and Mrs Holmes has taken off to start a new life. She might have told her daughter what she was doing – but she didn’t. Her brothers don’t recognise Enola at the station; they ...”

“... is a bust of Beethoven and a photograph of Lenin; magazines with the faces of Marilyn Monroe and John Lennon; small vases of dead flowers and strings of gleaming beads; a tiny Jesus and Virgin Mary, bathed in blue light; and the nonpareil marker of 1970s low-cost luxury, a Black Magic chocolate box.Bedsit aftermath, campy museum ...”

“... that the extra information in the painted images, even to a degree in the photographed ones like John Coplans’s black and white prints, can bear being looked at for longer. There are colours the projector cannot match, there is information about how the painter used his hands, how he responded to the task of showing what an eye or a foot looks like, how he ...”

“... roles are reversed but almost everything else is the same. The first time they met, Gabrielle (or John Marcher) told Louis (May Bartram) the great governing secret of her/his life. She/he was waiting for a ‘strange, rare and terrible thing’ to happen, an event that would spring at its victim ‘like a hidden beast’ and perhaps ‘obliterate’ that ...”

“... money from, pictures of this sort: for Sir George Beaumont The Blind Fiddler; for the financier John Julius Angerstein (who paid 800 guineas) The Village Holiday; for the Prince Regent Blind Man’s Buff (finished 1813). Wilkie became an associate and then a member of the Royal Academy while very young; he was knighted and made a painter to the King. He was ...”

“... either, reluctantly agrees. In the present, Nora is married to another writer (Arthur, played by John Magaro), and Hae Sung has become an engineer. He announces that he would like to visit Nora in New York. Nora doesn’t think of saying no to the reunion, and Arthur is the person who makes the remarks I quoted earlier about the ‘story’ and being ‘part ...”

“... gardening has been the fashion.There have been times, however, when London’s green tide was out. John Evelyn’s intentions in writing Sylva (‘A discourse of forest and the propagation of timber in his majesties dominions’), published in 1664, were practical. The book answered a request from the Commissioners of the Navy to the Royal Society for advice ...”

“... are note-like sketches – the one of hanged men, for example, or the drawings of the entourage of John VIII Palaeologus, the Byzantine Emperor, made when he was attending the Council of Ferrara in 1438 – but it is the worked-up studies which best meet Facio’s description: of a horse harness drawn as though to instruct a farrier, and the different ...”

“... so are disposable nappies.The English were early movers in the campaign to free the bound baby – John Locke spoke out against swaddling in Some Thoughts Concerning Education – but in France, despite Rousseau, it had a longer history. As babies make no comment, the relative comfort of papoose mode and free-kicking mode are hard to judge, but decisions about ...”

“... Millet, who painted rural life, carved welcoming paths into his landscapes, Rousseau, much like John Everett Millais in his late works, creates a buffer zone of tangled branches or impassable swamps. In An Avenue in Isle-Adam Forest (1849), the viewer glimpses an inviting glade framed by the forest’s dark canopy, but broken boughs and bushes bar the ...”