“... two Corinne Day photographs (one of Kate again) and some earlier monochrome prints, including George Hoyningen-Huene’s 1930 Modern Mariners Put out to Sea, of two androgynous swimmers on a diving board, the old Penguin Classics cover for The Great Gatsby. The far end of this group is presided over by Alexander McQueen, in a huge image blown up to fill a ...”

“... the fight against the insurgents in most of the country by the end of 2005. I heard General George Casey, commander of the Multinational Forces in Iraq, say: ‘We should be able to take some fairly substantial reductions in the size of our forces.’ I heard that the insurgents had been driven out of the cities and into the desert and that they were ...”

“... so completely with the characters he played in films, such as the idealised football player George Gipp in Knute Rockne, All American (1940), that they took up long-term residence in his consciousness. As president, Reagan routinely invoked the Notre Dame star when he implored subordinates to ‘go out there and win one for the Gipper.’ A Regular ...”

“... plinths in a psychosexual romance of heavy cloaks, gas masks, boots and belts. I think of Walter Owen’s strange First World War fantasy, The Cross of Carl (1931), in which underground trains shunt still conscious corpses from the trenches to industrial units, where they will be rendered into meat. Silver rails out of the capital double as telegraph ...”

“... own mayor in 1973, when Congress passed the Home Rule Act; a year later, it elected a black mayor, Walter E. Washington, thereby joining a group of major cities led by black politicians. A number of these cities – Cleveland, Detroit, Newark – would be ravaged by deindustrialisation, but at the time they were laboratories for black political ...”

“... the fay into the deep past. He considers the influential theory put forward by the anthropologist Walter Evans-Wentz in The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries (1911) that fairy belief contains vestiges of a ‘widespread and highly developed animistic creed’ that revered features of the natural world. Nature spirits like the Cailleach Bheur, or the archetypal ...”

“... are a tantalisingly small and pure uchronia, and as for his life, his model in these things was Walter Raleigh. A Life of Bunting, then, was for many years the most obviously ‘missing’ book I could think of. For all the reasons – the ticked boxes – above; for a rather beautiful relation between the life as old as the century (1900-85) and the ...”

“... with the extraordinary Goncourt brothers, with Turgenev and Maupassant. The correspondence with George Sand is particularly engaging. More than anyone else, Sand challenged Flaubert’s advocacy of impersonality, astutely suggesting that it was his own personal issue more than anything else. She pointed out how good and generous he was to his friends, which ...”

“... the bank was a very profitable business, though it sometimes placed them in awkward positions: George Washington, for example, was a stockholder when the bank was financing the war to put down his rebellion. For the state, having easy access to a huge pool of private capital allowed it to outspend and ultimately defeat France, even though it was larger and ...”

“... of the art world, and perhaps to see eggs chucked at the officials who gave prizes to Gilbert and George and at the critics who acclaimed Julian Schnabel, begin to wonder whether we might be mistaken for part of the congregation – or is it a rally? – and find ourselves having to kneel, or sing the National Anthem. The subject of art schools is ...”

“... has traditionally been mocked (even by critics now as prehistoric-looking themselves as Walter Allen) as the epitome of middlebrow philistinism – on a par with the Janeite who reads Austen every year to relish her ‘wit’. This, however, is the company Wall prefers. Wall takes it for granted that Trollope must be swallowed as the boa takes the ...”

“... and tie. She was now in the orbit of Harland’s contributors and John Lane’s Keynotes – ‘George Etherton’, Evelyn Sharp, Netta Syrett and the languid but sharp-witted Ella D’Arcy. These young women were not Bohemians: they were dandies. They objected when Frederick Rolfe left lice on the furniture; Beardsley was ‘a dear boy’ to them. At the ...”

“... and a morality that can be formulated and talked about, not just sealed in the amber of Walter Pater’s cadences. His own talk about it, particularly when he shows it in splendid action in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, is as good as Pound’s talk, and comes, as Pound’s does, from taking seriously what is being talked about by Guinicelli and Cavalcanti ...”

“... the hubris of planners. Two years later, he helped to organise the colloquium in Paris inspired by Walter Lippmann’s Inquiry into the Principles of the Good Society, which had used Austrian ideas to attack Roosevelt’s New Deal, while also urging liberals to move past ‘the fallacy of laissez-faire’ and build a positive legal-political agenda. The German ...”

“... for at one level they issued from, and conferred, an experience of the good things of life. George III is credited with the accurate prediction that ‘he was a very clever fellow, but that he would never be a bishop.’ Smith was bored by the country, but was exiled for most of his career to rural livings – at Foston in Yorkshire and Combe Florey in ...”