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“... the challenge of Vidal’s cagey wit by bearing down even harder, giving him the full Leon Edel-Matthew Bruccoli filing-cabinet treatment. For years Vidal has made fun of ‘scholar-squirrels’ – myopic trivia buffs who comb the lives of Hemingway and Fitzgerald hoping to find the one itty-bitty piece of factual lint no one else has – and here comes ...”

“... accused him, with some justice, of rhetorical artifice. Many other critics, such as Mrs Humphry Ward, denounced him for lacking any sense of evidence and for being ready to make sweeping deductions from narrow premises. Gladstone was well aware of his defects as a writer. As early as his thirties, he confessed to his brother-in-law that he wrote ‘not by a ...”

“... of threat are overingenious or underdeveloped. The illness that brought Rosalind into Perowne’s ward was ‘certainly an attack on her whole way of life’, their courtship in hospital ‘a time of terror’; the unintended consequences of invading Iraq are compared to ‘a knife at the throat’. The expected grand correspondence between the political ...”

“... Garbo, or on the face of Marcello Morante at the opening of Pasolini’s The Gospel According to Matthew) that we could gaze with impunity at a face as it changed, just as Morante’s does in those first two scenes when he confronts the inexplicably pregnant Mary, shading from doubt and disappointment through dismay to a stoic and compassionate acceptance ...”

“... materials he used. Perhaps the most intriguing essay in an exceptional catalogue, however, is by Matthew Craske, on Sandby’s many images of Windsor. Many of these are perfectly finished architectural drawings of the castle and its terrace of a kind to delight the 18th-century amateurs of antiquarian topography. There is one image in particular, of the ...”

“... considering the dainty fruit that sprang of that unspotted root? . . . To the first [chapter] of Matthew, when I vouched it against this beastly paradox, wherein she was affirmed to conceive by the Holy Ghost, he said the Jews of Italy would tell another tale and put both Matthew, Mark and John to silence . . . In divers ...”

“... are not far to seek: his wife was the great-niece of the poet, and her mother, Mrs Humphry Ward of Robert Elsmere fame, had even composed a special free-thinkers’ marriage service for G.M. Trevelyan’s wedding. The late Victorian child was truly father to the Master of Trinity. Trevelyan was as strongly opposed to modernity, urban modernity, as any ...”

“... a boy in Leeds, this Monday in Easter week was always noteworthy for a performance of Bach’s St Matthew Passion in Leeds Parish Church, which I dutifully attended as one of a party from my church youth club. It was dutiful because half the evening – and more than half – I used to find tedious to a degree, as I never appreciated the beauty or the appeal ...”

“... of formal education. So she started writing about the law instead, in pieces about the Stephen Ward and Lady Chatterley trials for Esquire, Jack Ruby for Life, the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial for the Saturday Evening Post. ‘The law, the workings of the law, the daily application of the law to people and situations, is an essential element in a country’s ...”

“... of the ‘Birmingham Enlightenment’ is gripping. He doesn’t make it altogether clear why Matthew Boulton, Joseph Priestley and Erasmus Darwin chose to base their Lunar Society at Soho House in Handsworth, but he does paint an intriguing picture of the industrial-scientific circle that grew up around them. For these men, the line between industrial ...”

“... of his sister-in-law.Geoffrey’s great-grandfather was Thomas Arnold of Rugby, which meant that Matthew Arnold was a great-uncle. Geoffrey was born in the spring of 1888 at Toxteth, where his father was principal of Liverpool College. His mother, one of the daughters of Thomas Arnold the younger, was the sister of Mary Arnold, Mrs Humphry ...”

“... work was called Wound for a Crucifixion. John Russell described it as being ‘set in a hospital ward … On a sculptor’s armature was a large section of human flesh: a specimen wound.’ It didn’t sell, so Bacon took it home and destroyed it, something he would continue to do throughout his life. This time, he regretted the loss: ‘I may never be able ...”

“... a perfectly law-abiding member of the group. In August 1876, when he was 21, he wrote to William Ward about their contemporary Charles Todd, later chaplain to the Royal Navy: ‘In our friend Todd’s ethical barometer, at what height is his moral quicksilver? Last night I strolled into the theatre about ten o’clock and to my surprise saw Todd and young ...”

“... his back on it, he buried it deeper, he buried it from me. I found the phrase in the poetry of Matthew Arnold, which I loved at this stage, and which was one of the few tastes I had that bound me to the ‘official’ culture of the school, and two things made the discovery more poignant. One was that Arnold’s poetry was itself the poetry of a buried ...”

“... together and are buried together.’ Nura had her books with her for her exams. Her chemistry, her Matthew Arnold, all of it going with her, as ‘the moon lies fair/Upon the straits’.Many of the Muslim women I spoke to weren’t keen on retribution. Most of them had no interest in apportioning blame or fighting over compensation. ‘It is all in the hands ...”