“... the 20th century’. As it happened, Gibran could remember not only his previous reincarnation as William Blake, but also a subsequent incarnation as Dante Gabriel Rossetti. During the First World War he was offered a high-ranking political post and agents of the Ottoman Empire tried to assassinate him. He was impervious to pain and he communicated with a ...”

“... was less squeamish. He retained a manuscript of the poem until May 1822, when he approached William Blackwood seeking publication of ‘some splendid fragments’ to which he had contributed as ‘a very humble adjunct’ to the principal author: ‘a Friend of mine who now ranks in the very foremost of the poetical world’. Writing again two weeks ...”

“... Bacon, Philip Guston and Antonio Tapiès, and such contenders as Rachel Whiteread, Thomas Ruff and William Kentridge. Rosa Martínez selected the survey in the vast Arsenale, the old shipyard, where 49 artists and/or groups are spread out over nine thousand square metres.Both exhibitions include work that alludes to the present debacle of war and ...”

“... London this month, returned to Bengal in September 1913 after a triumphant spell in England. Sir William Rothenstein had introduced him to English literary and artistic circles in the course of the previous year. His own prose versions of some of his poems, entitled Gitanjali, with a prefatory essay by W.B. Yeats, had met with instant acclaim, and Macmillan ...”

“... In July​ 1657 William Wood, a young immigrant to Maryland, was paddling along a creek of the Patuxent River when he found a body floating in the water. Dragging the corpse to land, he discovered it was Harry Gouge, a servant of John Dandy’s, whose watermill Wood had just left. He fetched Dandy, who came with two other men ...”

“... there was only Leon Edel (who in due course encouraged his colleague Gay Wilson Allen to write William James: A Biography, which appeared in 1967). Edel was at first going to produce an edition of Henry James’s letters, but decided to delay for over twenty-five years while he put out his four biographical volumes, edited The Diary of Alice James, and ...”

“... youthful Hugh Walpole (one of the earliest kittens to fluster Benson with his friskiness) or Eton masters like William Johnson Cory and Oscar Browning, his fear of sex was so great that he could keep his footing in the ‘precarious trade’ of schoolmastering and avoid that common exile for the too attentive Etonian ...”

“... pop up, in a frivolous or portentous spirit, and they are often relevant to the concerns of William Gaddis’s later novels, JR and Carpenter’s Gothic. One of the slighter-seeming themes is the learned American’s scorn for those of his compatriots who know no language but English. If you have ever been in Athens or Rome with an American ...”

“... Heren, the veteran foreign correspondent, had hoped to become editor of the Times in succession to William ReesMogg, when Rupert Murdoch bought the newspaper. Heren was told that, at 61, he was too old. Under Harold Evans he failed to flourish (‘Evans trashes me, to use the US Army expression, and most of my former colleagues in his book Good Times, Bad ...”

“... of the Suez Canal. The possibility of military operations by the former imperialist masters of the region was the object alike of Egyptian propaganda and American concern. Nor did it take much imagination to foresee that Israel might characteristically conclude that aggression was the best form of self-defence. This opened up the possibility of ...”

“... Cook adored ‘our trusty friend the Watch’, relied on it absolutely, and told his Admiralty masters that K-1 had passed its tests with flying colours. The clock subsequently followed the British flag across the Pacific: with Cook to his death in Hawaii in 1779, then with Captain Arthur Phillip to the new penal settlement in Botany Bay in 1788. A second ...”

“... in operatic performances in England’. Here and there are flashes of the later Shaw. He describes William Carter’s cantata, Placida, as ‘eminently inoffensive. It constantly refreshes the listener with reminiscences of familiar masters.’ A little later, Wagner’s overture to Tannhäuser holds the audience seated ...”

“... passed – a flash. In the Parr recapitulation this would equate with the moment in the 1950s when William Klein began to press his wide-angle lens close in – he didn’t care if the subject was seen to be seeing and reacting to him.In the show the effect of Parr’s transition is giddy drama. It is not only the brightness, garishness, shininess and fine ...”

“... woman called Alice Howe Gibbens at the Radical Club in Boston and immediately concluded that William James should marry her. In one version of the story, Henry James Sr returned from a meeting and announced to those at home that he had seen William’s future bride. Another version attributes the discovery to the ...”

“... role, she carried everything to extremes, her egotism above all. When she was 15, she decided that William Lamb was the man for her, and she duly got him; but not until 1805, when his prospects were changed by his becoming the Melbourne heir on the death of his elder brother, did he feel able to propose to her, a development which pleased the families of ...”