“... Frank Swettenham’ by John Singer Sargent (1904) Augustus John’s T.E. Lawrence is more unsure of himself, and the happiness of his expression suggests a man who liked to be liked. He’s wearing an Arabic head dress, and displayed next to John’s portrait of King Faisal – whose resemblance to Alec Guinness, the man who played him in ...”

“... I ought to have been among other things a good poet,’ Thomas Lovell Beddoes wrote in the postscript to the brief and perfunctory note he left before swallowing a lethal dose of poison. He was 45 years old and had published nothing, save the odd poem, for a quarter of a century. In 1821, as a precocious Oxford undergraduate, he had brought out a volume called The Improvisatore, which was followed in 1822 by a verse drama, The Brides’ Tragedy ...”

“... The legend named Thomas Chatterton is less marvellous than the boy it glorified, and far less rich or strange than the cultural history that includes the history of the legend itself. Chatterton committed suicide in August 1770. He was not yet 18 years old. With little formal education – seven years in a provincial school, followed by less than three years as a lawyer’s apprentice – he left his native Bristol to make his way as a writer in London, where he died only four months later ...”

“... Frances Milton waited until she was 30 before making a good match with a London barrister. Thomas Anthony Trollope had professional prospects and ‘expectations’ of a rich, unmarried and conveniently antique uncle. The dutiful Mrs Trollope had seven children in ten years (only two were to survive into mature age), while her husband contrived to ruin ...”

“... when I looked away from the screen. I’ve only read one of the sodding things, but that’s more than enough to convince me that ebooks suck. Especially if they’re written by Michael Crichton. Crichton’s previous effort, State of Fear, which is available in Italian and hardback at my local post office, turns on the premise that climate change is a ...”

“... or stop into a chemist for a bar of lemon-scented soap. There are hundreds of history books, some more heavyweight than others, that focus on a single day: as often as not 6 June 1944 or 22 November 1963, though 18 June 1815 is putting in a good showing this year, and there are many not exactly world-famous days in history that have had the ...”

“... or a faith school, or a city academy. It is, however, slightly unusual in being comprehensive in more than just name. Almost a third speak a language other than English at home. Twenty per cent are entitled to free school meals (shorthand for children whose parents receive income support, income-based jobseeker’s allowance, or financial help in accordance ...”

“... whom the Marshall Plan is named, drew up the order of battle for the American Expeditionary Force. More than a million American soldiers fought in what is known as the Hundred Days Offensive: 122,000 were injured; 26,000 were killed. The monument is a 180-foot-high Doric pillar made of granite; the figure of Liberty stands at the top, with its right arm ...”

“... States is not interested,’ Roosevelt told a weary Stalin in 1944. The Kremlin would have been more comfortable keeping to some form of a zones-of-influence system for a while longer, a wish shared by many ‘wise men’ of the West, from Alexandre Kojève to George Kennan, who preferred a world of bounded empires to one of nation-states. But by war’s ...”

“... seemed almost impregnable. In the 1820s, the walls of the established fortress began to crumble. More by chance than good management, the Whigs formed the ministries of the 1830s and called on philosophic radicalism to supply them with a programme. ‘Reform’ was the great word. The decade was one of apparent open possibility: the right push at the right ...”

“... met annually with editors to describe what he was working on – is the central challenge faced by Thomas Kunkel in his new life of the writer, Man in Profile. Kunkel found references to several possible projects: a big New York novel in the manner of James Joyce whom Mitchell admired above all other moderns; a life and times of a smart and funny woman who ...”

“... Mauss, Evans-Pritchard or Weber, have all been obsessed by these issues, which they connect more or less closely with the very origins of our own society. Here the origins of social science and the origins of modern society are traced to the same source. Stolen Lightning is much more an examination of these great ...”

“... public!” is the inevitable reflection at the end of one’s life.’ But there is, necessarily, more to Hardy than this, and he was always torn between the impulse to concealment (and even dissimulation) and the impulse to self-exposure. He can alternately repel the reader, as he might have warned a trespasser out of the grounds of Max Gate, and shock or ...”

“... Some fictional characters are easier to imagine being than others, either because they’re more like us (‘we’ being whoever’s doing the imagining, whether readers or writers), or because they’re more like characters familiar from other stories. Agu, the narrator of Beasts of No Nation, Uzodinma Iweala’s short, intense and ambitious first novel, is a rebel soldier in a civil war in an anonymous African country ...”

“... was part of the war effort.”’ Despite this flash of hostility, she kisses him. But he wants more than kisses. ‘I wish I had something to remember you by,’ he says, and starts fumbling with her clothes. She tries to stop him; he rapes her; she headbutts him; he runs away. The next day, ‘the morning after the invasion’ of Occupied Europe, but also ...”