“... with angina. He was probably deterred from making this known by fear for his revered teacher, John Hunter, who was already suffering from the condition and was shortly to die of it. The irascible Hunter was said to have keeled over during an argument with a colleague. ‘My life is in the hands of any fool who cares to upset me,’ he had said awhile ...”

“... of discrimination and exclusion was alien to his sensibility, and he continually chafed at it. ‘John Donne Arriving in Heaven’ (1911) sees four people ‘praying in different directions’. When Heaven is all around, there is no single direction in which to turn, no focal point on which to concentrate. If a world resides in one grain of sand it must also ...”

“... of the same sculpture (it was ‘the noblest presentment of the human countenance’, according to John Buchan), Beard allows herself a smile in reserve. Under re-examination by 20th-century curators, the bust lost its honoured plinth in the museum. Once hailed as a study done from life, it is now stored away as an 18th-century pastiche. Beard relates many ...”

“... poets discussed by Bridget Keegan – Ann Yearsley, Mary Robinson, Henry Headley and later John Clare – were all of one mind about this. Chatterton, they thought, had died by his own hand in poverty and despair, neglected by the metropolitan world. Michael Suarez’s account here shows that Chatterton’s relations with the book trade after he ...”

“... of London society in the 18th century interest in weight became a measure of male hypochondria. Joseph Addison imagined a weight-obsessed man who spent all day checking his weight by sitting on a pair of scales: ‘I do not dine and sup by the Clock, but by my Chair; for when that informs me my Pound of Food is exhausted I conclude my self to be hungry, and ...”

“... dance was structured episodically: it included a runaway slave, scenes from Harper’s Ferry and John Brown’s execution, and a play within a play of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Graham incorporated all of these elements into her scenario. She also added biblical quotations to link the episodes. The first two lines read: ‘This is a legend of living in the ...”

“... cruel and unenlightened Catholic zealots. Thomas Eakins visited Spain in 1869, followed later by John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassatt and others, bringing back visual and written descriptions of a country they thought both colourful and charming. The ‘Spanish craze’ reached epidemic proportions in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War of ...”

“... 17 August). McEwen was respectful of the tradition of flower painting epitomised by Pierre-Joseph Redouté, on whom he wrote an undergraduate thesis, but the exhibition’s suggestion that McEwen was ‘the Redouté of our time’ is somewhat misleading. His work is not only less concerned with conventional ideas of beauty, it lacks any obvious desire ...”

“... inherited the commitment to a devolved parliament in Edinburgh from his predecessor as leader, John Smith, and Donald Dewar, who would become first minister in Holyrood in 1999. Although there wasn’t the same investment in devolution in the Welsh Labour Party, the MP for Caerphilly, Ron Davies, managed to persuade Blair that proposals for a Welsh ...”

“... a visionary monologue notionally addressed to a love-object, though her reality is pretty foggy. John Stuart Mill read the poem attentively in preparation for a review which never appeared, although Browning did later get to see his notes and was understandably struck by one of Mill’s sharper comments: ‘The writer seems to me possessed with a more ...”

“... the genealogy of Jesus in particular: all that begetting! But what exactly does descent entail? Joseph is of the House of David, but he is in no sense consanguineous; his is not the eidos that bore Christ’s essence and quickened the matter in Mary’s womb. That would be God. The prophecy is fulfilled because of a particular understanding of ...”

“... who is behind all the bribes’ – which they alleged to be worth many millions of dollars. John Cripton, a Canadian impresario who had booked the Maryinsky/Kirov on foreign tours for ten years, said that Vinogradov used to demand additional payments on every contract. Vinogradov denies everything, and – now out on bail – has continued to work at ...”

“... Hugh Benson, Laurence Binyon, Robert Bridges, Hall Caine, G.K. Chesterton, Arthur Conan Doyle, John Galsworthy, Thomas Hardy, Maurice Hewlett, Anthony Hope, W.J. Locke, E.V. Lucas, J.W. Mackail, John Masefield, A.E.W. Mason, Gilbert Murray, Henry Newbolt, Owen Seaman, G.M. Trevelyan, H.G. Wells and Israel Zangwill ...”

“... Casement, thinks that we should not – it took place on 3 January 1904 and lasted only one day. Joseph Conrad had met Casement first in 1889 or 1890 in the Congo, when Casement was working for the Congo Railway Company. ‘For some three weeks,’ Conrad wrote, he lived in the same room in the Matadi Station of the Belgian Société du Haut-Congo. He was ...”

“... us would think that a beheading is a far greater threat than a sunburn.’ They could have picked John Kasich, a former Congressman and Fox News host, currently governor of Ohio. Known throughout his career as a phlegmatic and abusive man, widely disliked in Congress, he underwent an image makeover for the presidential campaign. He became, in his own words, a ...”