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“... in a Massachusetts institution for the feeble-minded. In Sargent’s painting, the eldest girl, Florence, who was 14, leans against an oversized vase with her hands clasped in front of her and her enigmatic profile turned towards the darkness; the figure beside her is Jane, or Jeanie, born two years later. The girl in the red dress to the left is ...”

“... line. But he was a loyal servant, impeccably connected, who always voted in Parliament the way the king would have wished and who was wheeled out to dignify state occasions. He gave his translations as New Year gifts to Henry, to the Princess Mary, to Thomas Cromwell. In religious matters he moved, like the king, from ...”

“... century. From Giovanni Morelli, and especially from August Schmarsow, under whom he studied in Florence in 1888, Warburg learned that incidental detail could be revelatory. His keen eye for animated ornament gave him the confidence to query received periodisation; according to him, ‘baroque undercurrents’ unsteadied the placid figures of the ...”

“... Traditionally, the patriarch as a literary character is not let off so lightly. Beside Job, King Lear and the Vicar of Wakefield, Harry Caldecote most certainly has nothing to complain of. The biggest threat to his peace of mind comes, one would guess, from the precocious minicab driver who warns him that the whole ‘drinking culture’ is destined to ...”

“... poetry does. It doesn’t even sound like a book I’d like. It’s the story of Martin Luther King’s murderer, James Earl Ray, mostly on the run in 1968, and mostly for a couple of weeks in Lisbon, spliced with reflection on a crisis (he of course doesn’t use such a word) in Muñoz Molina’s early life twenty years later, when his second child was ...”

“... by his father’, as one contemporary reported, to be educated and baptised. His father, a minor king in what is today Liberia, wanted Dederi to learn English so he could negotiate better trade deals, but conversion to Christianity was another advantage that might benefit the family. More than a century later, in 1754, 13-year-old Philip Quaque, a Fante of ...”

“... Many claims are made about its genesis, among them that it began circulation in 16th-century Florence as a symbol for the anfora, a unit of commercial measurement then in currency. A few years ago, La Repubblica published a photograph of a curlicue on a 1536 manuscript to prove it. But the French wouldn’t have got their arobase if they hadn’t derived ...”

“... cycle in question is a series of mythological frescoes by Vasari himself in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, each of which is paralleled – often in an extraordinarily contrived way – not just with the life and character of the patron, the Duke Cosimo de’ Medici, but also with earlier members of the Medici family. Here the analogy with imprese extends ...”

“... declarative poetry. The religious poem he set about producing after their marriage and move to Florence, Christmas Eve and Easter Day, has similarities to the work she was writing at the same time, Casa Guidi Windows, an exhortation to the revolutionaries of 1848. Both consist of a couple of thousand lines of ruminative verse, with descriptive ...”

“... Stephen King has occasionally raised a rueful protest against being typed as a horror writer – even with the consolation of being the best-selling horror writer in the history of the world. But, as he disarmingly reminds us, there is worse literary company than Lovecraft, Leiber, Bloch, Matheson and Jackson. ‘I could, for example, be an “important” writer like Joseph Heller and publish a novel every seven years or so, or a “brilliant” writer like John Gardner and write obscure books for bright academics who eat macrobiotic foods and drive old Saabs with faded but still legible GENE McCARTHY FOR PRESIDENT stickers on the rear bumpers ...”

“... in a sadly deteriorating world. At the age of 16 Princess May had skipped with her family to Florence to avoid the bailiffs, for the Tecks were notoriously hard up and May had the ‘unsavoury task of putting off their creditors’. Later her mother was to have much success in wheedling money out of Queen Victoria, to the annoyance of the other ...”

“... a Sword, but Julian Rathbone latterly re-established the pattern with his novel The Last English King. Harold and Hereward, and still in a fading sort of way Alfred the Great, are readily fitted into stories of national defiance. Pre-Conquest successes, like Bede and Offa and the highly creditable story of the English conversion and the missions to Germany ...”

“... Medusa (spurting stiff curls of blood) which has always stood in the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence. His book is sumptuously produced and (for the most part) superbly illustrated. But the publishers have estimated that the people able to afford it will wish to make their acquisition conspicuous and, consequently, it is so large that it is troublesome ...”

“... Bertie – now 21 – ‘shows more and more how totally, totally unfit he is for ever becoming King!’ Neither Victoria nor the constitution could prevent him from ascending to the throne on her death. It didn’t matter. Bertie – this generally amiable but foolish and corpulent cigar-smoking, tiger-shooting adulterer – was a perfectly respectable ...”

“... of the Epic of Gilgamesh, a poem that is even older, about the adventures of the historical king of Uruk, who ruled in the 27th century BCE. The indentations on the tablet report that the gods sent a flood to destroy mankind, and that one of the gods, Ea, warned Utnapishtim, king of Shuruppak in southern Iraq, who ...”