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“... Man Out of His Humour; Humfrey King, the poetic tobacconist; the barber-surgeons Tom Tooley and Richard Lichfield; the tavern joker John Stone. These loquacious oddballs found a small economic niche as ad hoc entertainers; they are haunters of St Paul’s Churchyard and the Inns of Court, of revels and convivia. We have no first-hand record of a Coryate ...”

“... year his blind daughter, Mary, was born – and suffered from a series of nervous illnesses which Richard Greaves unhelpfully approaches by means of psychiatric theory and William Styron’s compelling account of his own severe depression. In 1650 Bunyan had heard three or four women discussing religion: they were, he said, ‘far above out of my ...”

“... 1933, remembered leaving a café with Pessoa, and walking with him for a few blocks. Hourcade had, Richard Zenith writes, ‘this uncanny sensation: that the poet, as soon as he disappeared around the corner of a downtown street, had really disappeared, and would be nowhere in sight were he to run after him’.In 1934, a year before his death, Pessoa began a ...”

“... a quotation labouring to attain a modicum of reality. Not so much a dry David Hockney splash as Richard Wilson’s site-specific installation 20:50: his tank of sump oil, miraculously transubstantiated into this brilliant new substance, a liquid thicker than jelly but lighter than air. A seductive mosaic carpet across which you cannot walk without ...”

“... a vote censuring the Chamberlain government for its failure to supply British troops in Norway. As Richard Davenport-Hines records, the minister of health spat on Profumo’s shoe after he passed through the lobbies. The Tory chief whip told him that he was ‘an utterly contemptible little shit’. Even for a headstrong young man it was a remarkably ...”

“... deepened, the face was captured by some remarkable photographers, including Cecil Beaton, Richard Avedon and Jane Bown, and a string of artists. The vigorous scribble of Feliks Topolski naturally found him a good subject, as did the heroic sculptural instincts of Henry Moore, who drew Auden’s skin from memory on hearing of his death – ‘the ...”

“... Individually, the players have little leverage, but as a group they have the power of the dead weight, of a scarcely perceptible inertia – the withholding of that last degree of rigour and vivacity that they know he wants from them.The relationship of conductor to players became structurally vitiated once he stepped out from the ranks of the ...”

“... artistic prestige of stage design. Fashion has no such support. On the contrary, it bears a heavy weight of ancient discredit that still burdens many of those who work in it and write about it. There is therefore some real interest in finding a comfortable niche for the fashion designer, whose large presence on the cultural scene dates back only about a ...”

“... Mailer would add, Kennedy’s own assassination). There is something excessive about the weight of sex, violent and otherwise, in this anthology, of which Mailer’s twinning with Kennedy is a part, but the difficulty goes beyond mere quantity. Mailer rejects the banality of evil that he sees in American Psycho. Evil is satanic, he wants to ...”

“... German killed (elsewhere it had been even worse: fifty for every German). Kappler – played by Richard Burton in George P. Cosmatos’s film Massacre in Rome (1973) – had to come up with names very quickly: the killings were to be carried out within 24 hours of the attack. In the film we see Burton at a desk, adding the names of political prisoners, men ...”

“... peas and grapes, while the specialists proposed a sexual origin for his troubles, and he lost weight dramatically. ‘Brain-Fag’ was about the best they could do by way of diagnosis, and perhaps they were right. Autobiography’s main function in this picture of a sort of world and time is as an interference. It preserves the memoir from literary ...”

“... cost you around £110. This was a coin for serious trade, and the Florentines made sure that its weight and purity remained absolutely unchanged for the almost three hundred years it was minted, keeping meticulous records of alterations in design and instituting a system of quality control that saw each superintendent serving only six months in order to ...”

“... repressive figure of Joachim – though it does help one to understand the shock-waves caused by Richard Strauss, rocking the boat with solecisms, crudities, reckless infringements of instrumental propriety, general vulgarity and callowness, and troubling Tovey the chaste grammarian and self-appointed guardian of the sacred Teutonic flame. (But he doesn’t ...”

“... on which African Americans stood. ‘White people had Judy Garland. We had Nina,’ the comedian Richard Pryor said. Simone’s voice answered the radical call for a profound articulation of the Black Tradition and incidentally made her ‘the patron saint of rebellion’, according to Crouch. Her singing, an African-American critic wrote in the Philadelphia ...”

“... whether CIA agents were above the law – ‘the king’s personal staff’, as the CIA director Richard Helms called them – or, like all other Americans, subject to the constitution. In the end the Church committee found no smoking assassins’ guns but, as Hersh says, the powers that be employed ‘lots of euphemisms – “who will rid me of this ...”