“... admirer of Cézanne, Braque and Picasso, he was a very knowledgable collector and took few duties more seriously than his trusteeship of the National Gallery. He was equally passionate about literature, and could quote Shakespeare at enormous length. He was an enlightened president and governor of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre over many years and supported ...”

“... grow one. I can wait.’ Metcalf’s banter may be nearly as sharp as Marlowe’s, but he’s more self-conscious about his use of imagery. In the course of his inquisition he goes to see Stanhunt’s fellow urologist, Grover Testafer. At the house he meets the doctor’s lover, an evolved sheep called Dulcie. ‘“Okay,” I said. “You’re afraid of ...”

“... on 20 May at the Duck and Drake, off the Strand, the lodgings of his cousin and the disciple, Thomas Wintour. Three other men were invited: Jack Wright, a swordsman friend of Catesby’s; Thomas Percy, Wright’s brother-in-law and man of business to his kinsman, the magnate and Councillor the Earl of ...”

“... history and acknowledge that he had his own voice. The second reason is dubious. I agree with Thomas Kinsella’s view, in his Introduction to The New Oxford Book of Irish Verse (1986), that a ‘Northern Ireland Renaissance’ is ‘largely a journalistic entity’. Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, John Montague, Paul Muldoon, Seamus Deane, Michael Longley ...”

“... marriages, open and covert sexual deviancy, secrets and suicides. It provided material for Thomas, Heinrich, Erika and Klaus Mann’s novels and plays, and for plenty of biographies and psycho-literary studies besides. Golo Mann is the third of Thomas and Katja Mann’s six children. He was born in 1909 and must have ...”

“... Legion: Life in the Roman Army (at the British Museum until 23 June) are a number of less martial, more everyday objects: louse combs, drinking vessels, tent pegs, manicure sets, games and, perhaps most arresting of all, a single red woollen sock, from about the third century AD. Most of the weapons and armour are in various states of decay, rusty and ...”

“... through the mill. Michael Millgate calls his new edition of the biography ‘The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy by Thomas Hardy’. Since he has stripped it of the thin marital disguise of his wife’s name and cleared it of Florence’s editorial emendations carried out after Hardy’s death, he feels able to present it as ...”

“... and on the periphery, but central and predominant. (The rule in normal times had been that no more than a fifth of the undergraduates at Oxford could be women.) Midgley later wrote that the enhanced attention and absence of the usual competitive male atmosphere made it possible for her to find her voice as a philosopher. Distinctive and talented though ...”

“... density: never fewer than one lynching a week for the half-century starting in the 1870s; more than three a week in the 1890s. The museum shows how the Black Codes passed by Southern states after the end of the Civil War to restrict the occupations, movements and wages of former slaves led to the rise of incarceration of blacks for petty ...”

“... with the Light Brown Hair, the lost one ‘who comes not again’. The big Romantics all had their more portentous versions, from Lucy ceasing to be, to Shelley’s solipsistic sad heart, filled with grief ‘but with delight/No more, oh nevermore’. Poe’s sardonic raven enunciated ‘Nevermore’ as a standard ...”

“... wants it or they’ll die. In order to accommodate this novel notion of deluxe, Dana Thomas, in her startling and richly informative book, draws a line between luxury and ‘the luxury industry’: The luxury industry has changed the way people dress. It has realigned our economic class system. It has changed the way we interact. It has become ...”

“... In his lifetime an unyielding critic of priestcraft and superstition, Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) stands today at the heart of a cult which has been variously described as America’s ‘civil religion’, ‘the religion of the Republic’ and ‘American Shinto’. As individuals and families, Americans worship their own gods, or, more commonly, God in their own way: but collectively, as citizens, they learn the creed, and participate in the rituals of a sacralised American Way of Life ...”

“... In his lifetime his reputation was high, but Sir Thomas Lawrence was scarcely buried – with great pomp in the crypt of St Paul’s – before the feeling spread that his work had more brilliance than substance. Victorians, who disliked the morals and manners of the leaders of Regency society, found them reflected in Lawrence’s frequently showy pictures of the men, their wives, their mistresses and their children – legitimate and otherwise ...”

“... an elliptical novel can subside dolefully into a series of flat notes. Of the two, Wrinkles is the more original and interesting. It consists of forty-odd biographical sketches, each about three pages in length, of an unnamed middle-aged man. Each moves from childhood through maturity to old age, beginning in the past tense as a record of fact and ending in ...”

“... 860 people; currently there are about 1200. The number of guards has been cut and prisoners are more often locked in their cells. The detective voted for Brexit, not because he is pro or anti-Europe, more to throw a spanner into the works. He said he rents his home. The younger officers he works with own theirs, and in ...”