“... his own characteristic way a great man. His son acknowledged this in the wry admiration with which Stephen Dedalus, asked by a friend to define him, speaks of his father in A Portrait of the Artist: ‘A medical student, an oarsman, a tenor, an amateur actor, a shouting politician, a small landlord, a small investor, a drinker, a good fellow, a ...”

“... of money was shown by Quentin Matsys in The Money Changer and His Wife (1514), which depicts a young, smooth-faced woman distracted from her devotions to the Virgin by the glint of the coins her husband is busy weighing out. In his study of early modern genre painting in the city, Larry Silver cites a ballad from 1524:All the world used to be filled with ...”

“... affable front man for the Texas Rangers. ‘You know how it is with those Latin players,’ the young Bush told Sonny with his trademark smirk. ‘The first thing they do when they get that big contract, they go out and buy their wives a new set of titties.’ In another story, Fountain describes 1960s Southern hairdos as looking like ‘heavily shellacked ...”

“... already attracted to the dangerous sport of jousting – was surrounded by a dubious group of young bloods; and all this time Suffolk’s brother, Richard de la Pole, remained out of reach in Aachen. But Henry had done his work well and fate was kind to him: he died in April 1509; the more experienced councillors stitched up Empson and Dudley and managed ...”

“... and obscenities will have to wait for Caro to finish – if they live long enough. Well before Stephen Ambrose got blindsided a few months ago by the plagiarism police, he produced solid biographies of Eisenhower in two volumes (1983-84) and Nixon in three (1987-91). And though William McFeely won a Pulitzer Prize for his Grant (1981), that did not deter ...”

“... the formidable generation of scholars and translators of Japanese who encountered the country as young men during the US occupation – are homosexual. ‘Travellers almost by definition screw more (or want to screw more) than other people,’ Richie writes, and nowhere are they more avid in their screwing than in Japan. In the case of expat men, I would ...”

“... of 72 who says he’s bored with taking snapshots in the studio (this morning Isaiah Berlin and Stephen Spender) and wants to photograph me outside. ‘Outside’ means that eventually I find myself perched up a tree in Hyde Park. Avedon’s assistants bustle round with lights, Avedon himself scarcely bothering to look through the lens, just enquiring from ...”

“... there, and then, still convalescent from illness, only because of an aberrant desire to meet the young Queen Elizabeth during her tour of the Antipodes in 1954. She charmed him. Stricken by remorse for a lifetime of stiffnecked pride, he dragged himself again from his sickbed on the following Sunday to seek forgiveness at the nearest church. He died from a ...”

“... years, after which time her husband left for a long interval; at last the wife hears from an angry young gentleman that her husband has run away with the gentleman’s younger sister, an heiress. Either this young woman succeeds in persuading the courts that she is genuinely married (which makes Wife Number One a mere ...”

“... blacksmiths, six undertakers, 45 lawyers and sixteen landladies, several magistrates, a weaver (Stephen Blackpool in Hard Times), an umbrella-maker (Alexander Trott in Sketches by Boz), and many busy others. Today, workers in British novels are often vague figures, thin on the page and ghosts in society. Alarm clocks, crowded tube trains, horrible ...”

“... marriage, his growing irritability and an obscure triangular relationship with his wife and a young woman called Leontine Chipman, nicknamed Canada. After Willie’s death his widow Emily and Canada lived happily ever after, until Emily died leaving everything to Canada and nothing to Forster, who was disappointed. The domestic and sexual permutations ...”

“... different countries cheerfully fought against black reaction and military dictatorship.’ The young Marxist intellectual John Cornford was rather more self-possessed: ‘I came out with the intention of staying a few days, firing a few shots, and then coming home. It sounded fine, but you just can’t do things like that. You can’t play at civil war, or ...”

“... cheered them on, the armed freedom fighters numbered no more than 15,000; they were mostly young, and they were ‘deeply nationalist, anti-Soviet and anti-Russian – but not anti-socialist’. ‘Second, the revolution lacked effective leadership.’ It was a ‘bungling performance’. Imre Nagy’s ‘fearless, uncompromising behaviour before the ...”

“... into his head immediately’. In a similarly deadpan tone the narrator remarks that he thought the young man threw a pumpkin, but others have claimed it was a watermelon. The narrator’s inaction at the time, shared with the others who observed the events, segues into a reluctance to make much of the acknowledged political and analytical potential of the ...”

“... the eternal and the modern. The ‘half a Londoner’ he brings into relief is the young man who left his native Dorset for London in the 1860s, and who laboured, during the next two decades, to conquer the city. Even after his permanent return to country life in 1881, he and his wife spent several months a year in the capital, an arrangement ...”