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“... of 1877, he spotted a potential model, Margaret Benson, at a concert rehearsal in the Albert Hall and arranged for an introduction. ‘She has often been called my “Burne-Jones daughter”,’ the obliging Mrs Benson told him. Though the critics were generally appreciative when The Golden Stairs was first shown at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1880, they ...”

“... of Rye, the cobbled and gabled ‘Tinkerbell Towne’, as Burra dubbed it, where memories of Henry James and Stephen Crane were fresh and sightings of Radclyffe Hall and her friend Una, Lady Troubridge, lent a touch of verisimilitude to the farcical Rye that, passed off as ‘Tilling’, was the abode of E.F. Benson’s Mapp ...”

“... have provided material for such distinguished hams as Jason Robards, Rip Torn, Philip Baker Hall and Anthony Hopkins. Feeney contends that Nixon had a unique capacity among US presidents for constructing narratives around himself. He renames Nixon’s memoir, Six Crises, ‘Six Star Turns’, and notes that its subject ‘presents himself throughout as ...”

“... decrypts poured in from Bletchley, to be mulled over by a team including the legendary Admiral Hall, whose Room 40 in the Admiralty had laid the foundations of modern cryptography during World War One; Stewart Menzies, head of SIS (the model for James Bond’s M); Lieutenant-Colonel Kenneth Strong from Military ...”

“... couldn’t be sure, you could only surmise. But then surmising is the bedrock of the bawdy music-hall humour that the upper-middle-class mandarins at the BBC were trying to proscribe in the 1930s, and which the popular press has always claimed as its justification – providing traditional entertainment for the working classes, just like Chaucer and ...”

“... For instance, the friar describes the great Silver Tree of Caracorum, which stood in the reception hall of the royal palace. Four gilded serpents twined around its trunk; four silver lions sat by its base. When the khan wished to pour drinks for his guests, a mechanical angel in the crown sounded a trumpet and caused the lions to dispense fountains of ...”

“... the more aristocratic foreign visitors to London’, making it sound like something out of a Henry James novel. Newnham-Davis wrote that Mrs Myra Washington dined there, an American who knew ‘most people who are worth knowing in Europe’. As she sat at her table, her ‘cream-coloured miracle of a dress’ was reflected in all the mirrors. What​ explains ...”

“... and his fellow ‘Lunar Men’: the select club of Midlanders that included Joseph Priestley, James Watt and Erasmus Darwin. But many of Wedgwood’s more radical ideals were in direct conflict with the needs of his business, which involved putting expensive, intricate ornamental vases on royal and aristocratic tables to stimulate emulative demand among ...”

“... P.143. First three lines. P.183. Third, fourth and fifth lines.’ Break off to hum a few music-hall hits: ‘Par’ ought to know’; ‘When there isn’t a girl about, you do feel lonely.’ Scramble your commentary with polyglot puns and in clashing literary registers: ‘Successful shade, accept my hand in fraternal contrition! We are druv’ to ...”

“... books as prizes in a writing competition. The premises are in Hanover Square up behind the Town Hall and beyond the Infirmary, and, when I was a boy, one of the grander squares in Leeds, where the posh doctors and surgeons from the Brotherton Wing had their consulting-rooms. Nowadays the ring road makes the square difficult to get to and it’s in a bad ...”

“... out of it, or the title of the second anyway. Finn. Finnegan. It was here on 10 June 1904 that James Joyce met Nora Barnacle, who worked in the hotel. The two young strangers who had locked eyes stopped to talk, and they arranged to meet four days later outside the house where Sir William Wilde, eye surgeon to the queen in Ireland, if she should have ever ...”

“... clear, is disingenuous: Lee stayed – unlike many of the Clydesiders whose ties to the ILP leader James Maxton were as strong as hers – because she didn’t want to compromise her socialist principles. She believed in fighting for socialism against the enemy, which was sometimes within: ‘I wanted to take part in a political contest where the alignments ...”

“... People would ring the doorbell to ask about Stevenson, and they still do. John remembers James Pope Hennessy turning up when he was writing his book about RLS. ‘He was busy turning down a knighthood at the time,’ Mr Macfie said. ‘And I think they were keen to give it to him in thanks for all he hadn’t written about Queen Mary.’ Macfie’s ...”

“... shows the museum’s collection of Buddhist icons to the lama: Out shuffled the lama to the main hall, and, the Curator beside him, went through the collection with the reverence of a devotee and the appreciative instinct of a craftsman.   Incident by incident in the beautiful story he identified on the blurred stone ...   Here was the devout ...”

“... on John Akomfrah’s film triptych The Unfinished Conversation, featuring the memories of Stuart Hall; a book of essays about Kanye West. These interests are all evident in Fisher’s work too.The second memorial lecture was given in January by the American political theorist Jodi Dean, who is keen to rescue the word ‘communist’ from its negative ...”