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“... documentary sources,’ he writes, ‘include the hitherto unpublished expedition journals of William Grant Stairs and memoirs of Alice Pike Barney’; he also pays generous tribute to Richard Hall’s earlier biography, ‘a model of hard-nosed and painstaking investigation’. Hall was the first to reveal Stanley’s secret engagement to Alice ...”

“... that he could not and perhaps did not want to understand’. How much better if the Scots artist William Scott had not tried to explain the force which impelled him to introduce frying pans and kitchen objects into his works. Their ‘multivalent symbolic significance’ at first reflected the ‘elemental life of the simple poor’ and then became ‘the ...”

“... Their friends included the ageing Radical John Bright and Elizabeth Gaskell’s widower, William. But smart society was closed to them and this was something that Beatrix’s mother, Helen, seems to have minded deeply. A grim-faced little woman, she apparently occupied herself entirely with a round of calls and with ordering and re-ordering her ...”

“... three weeks; a second and third followed rapidly. ‘Holy Hannah’, as Horace Walpole called her (William Cobbett called her ‘the Old Bishop in petticoats’), was already a celebrity. William Roberts, the family friend entrusted with the task of producing the book, made her into a saint. He presented her as a vessel ...”

“... perhaps to re-create the disorientation of the senses recommended by Rimbaud and diagnosed by William James. The groupuscule we call the Beats (short for ‘beatitude’) was by 1961 geographically and emotionally scattered: Kerouac (barely present in Baker’s book) hunkered down at his mother’s house, Burroughs cocooned himself in Tangier, Neal ...”

“... The future isn’t what it used to be. In one of William Gibson’s first published stories, ‘The Gernsback Continuum’, a photographer is assigned to capture examples of ‘futuristic’ American design from the Thirties, the kind of dream architecture that graced the covers of pulp science fiction magazines like Amazing Stories ...”

“... So-called World History originated in an attempt to escape from the tyrannical perspective of dead white Euro-American males, yet that ‘world’ perspective has had the effect of making those same males more dominant than ever. Thus Eric Wolf’s Europe and the People Without History (1982), however heroic in intention, ends up asserting that extra-European peoples did have a history, but it was a history of their relations with Euro-American economies ...”

“... 26 June). They hang on either side of the more reticent Standing Female Figure, a bronze by William Turnbull, whose textured surface and swathed upright form suggests a mummified Giacometti. The pairing illustrates how unusual Cordell’s paintings were in going beyond the inhibition and deference to French and American art that mark much British work ...”

“... a single journalist of the overpaid legions who swarm around the Pentagon, State Department and White House has ever bothered to investigate it. Iraq might once have been a potential challenge to Israel. It was the one Arab country with the human and natural resources, as well as the infrastructure, to take on Israel’s arrogant brutality. That is why ...”

“... familiar with other potteries often commented on the neatness of Rie’s studio and her pristine white apron. It was a telling contrast to the prevailing style of British craft ceramics at the time she came to England. Dominated by Bernard Leach, whose tendentious and quasi-philosophical A Potter’s Book appeared in 1940, it cultivated a masculine, not to ...”

“... his Collected Poems, has 58; Cat’s Whisker by Philip Gross (three years on) 41; Jouissance by William Scammell (two years) 38; Disbelief by John Ash (three years) 55; Ken Smith’s Wormwood, a collection of poems written during a spell as a writer in residence in Wormwood Scrubs (one year), 30. The justification for such work-rates, beyond the economics ...”

“... to terrorise, absolute terror terrorises absolutely. Th-th-that’s all, folks!’ The narrator, William Cowling, fails to become a terrorist, since he is too frightened, but his girlfriend, Sarah Strouch, passes the test and, by 1980, she is saying: ‘Terrorism is a state of mind, but nobody gets terrified anymore.’ Some two hundred pages later, she is ...”

“... In a power-rhyming slap-happy parody of Thirties doom-mongering published in 1938 William Empson famously had ‘Just a Smack at Auden’: What was said by Marx, boys, what did he perpend? No good being sparks, boys, waiting for the end. Treason of the clerks, boys, curtains that descend, Lights becoming darks, boys, waiting for the end ...”

“... spirits in the form of ectoplasmic structures, or ‘pseudo-pods’. These long viscous skeins of white stuff, which sometimes passed as if miraculously through a gauzy gag tied over Eva C.’s face, were thought to be ‘ideoplasts’ – projections of the medium’s mind. The photographer and impresario of these séances was Mme Juliette Bisson, a rich ...”

“... Eliot’s fingerprints are all over this book). There is a dream of a music lesson taught by William Byrd, a history of English poetry in the manner of one of Blake’s prophetic books, and a perambulation of London in which Hogarth repeats passages of The Analysis of Beauty and marches Timothy through the scenes of his engravings of London life. Most ...”