“... a room in Beirut and engaged Matisse as decorator. The sunlit balcony looked onto a blue sea. The white wooden table beside my transatlantique held a sliced melon. Hibiscus bloomed nearby. Some other fragrance that I could not and cannot name is still available to my senses, as arc the other wholly abstract elements of this notional construct, invulnerable to ...”

“... understand/why guacamole is/extra/it is because/you/were never/enough – rupi kaur.’ William Carlos Williams is up there with her as a parodied subject, racking up thousands of posthumous likes for internet rewritings of ‘This Is Just to Say’ – the plums and icebox poem which can handily be tweaked in the Notes app on an iPhone. ‘I have ...”

“... relations to her friendship with Graham Greene and her love affair with Naples. In 1961, William Maxwell accepted the first story she submitted to the New Yorker, the fragrant, Elizabeth Bishop-like ‘Woollahra Road’. She published two collections: Cliffs of Fall (1963) and People in Glass Houses (1967). The latter – a series of linked stories ...”

“... our master supped abroad that night.                   Harry On the smooth, white-washed ceiling near thy bed, Mixed with thine own, is Anna’s cypher read; From wreaths of dusky smoke the letters flow; Whose hand the waving candle held, I know. Fines and jobations shall thy soul appall, Whene’er our mistress spies the sully’d ...”

“... chivalric ideal in modern society, nor was it to be the last. Already, in 1825, the tall tower of William Beckford’s new baronial hall. Font-hill Abbey, had collapsed without warning. A few years after the Eglinton debacle, one of the day’s leading artists, William Dyce, was commissioned to paint allegorical frescoes on ...”

“... quarterly called Forum, and set about publishing everyone he admired, including Walker Percy, William Gass and the not yet famous Marshall McLuhan. In 1960, he joined the board of Houston’s Contemporary Arts Association and the following year became the museum’s temporary director. He remained there for just over a year. It was a period of ...”

“... by them. Which recalls Auden’s inversion in ‘Epitaph on a Tyrant’ of Motley’s epitaph on William the Silent: ‘When he cried, the little children died in the streets.’ Edmund Burke was accused by Mary Wollstonecraft and Tom Paine of putting it on in his lament for Marie Antoinette, but Burke protested that he had wept as he wrote and that the ...”

“... twenty feet from her, the woman turned, lifted a gun from the grass, and with her eyes full of white, she shot the taller boy through the heart.’ Achak and Achor Achor turn and run, as the woman still calls after them: ‘Come back! . . . I am your mother, come back, my children!’ This murderous anti-mother, a figure from any child’s worst ...”

“... is also attributed to Telford, though with the active collaboration of the more senior engineer William Jessop and the ironmaster William Hazledine. It consists of an iron trough supported on arched iron ribs and carried more than 120 feet above the Dee Valley on delicately tapered stone piers. It is dramatically ...”

“... streak leading from the back of each eye. Its legs are often described by observers as ‘milky-white’. In the early 19th century there was some experimenting with different names, among them the cream-coloured plover and the cream-coloured swiftfoot, before agreement settled on cream-coloured courser. The word ‘courser’, from the Latin cursor, a ...”

“... the supernatural. The alchemical papers at King’s have produced several books, most recently William R. Newman’s Newton the Alchemist (2018). All promote the idea that alchemy and science were, in their own time, inseparable, and that rationalism and occultism were very far from vying for each other’s extinction and the esteem of posterity.Outside ...”

“... Atlantic world. Travelling on to London that summer, Alexander was greeted by thronging crowds. William Wilberforce praised his anti-slavery stance in the House of Commons, calling him the ‘benefactor, not of Europe only, but of the human race’. Undeterred by Napoleon’s brief return to power in 1815, Alexander sought to confirm his status as ...”

“... North Vietnamese were ‘reacting defensively’. Nonetheless, Johnson personally lied to Senator William Fulbright, the highly respected chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in order to get him to sponsor the Tonkin Gulf Resolution in Congress. Ellsberg took all this calmly. He accepted Johnson’s campaign slogan for the 1964 Presidential ...”

“... door. At once he raised his hands as if to show he was unarmed, his handkerchief dropping like a white flag. ‘Madam!’ Ghastly pale I must have looked, under the light that dappled the tiled walls with swinging shadows. But then he took a breath, tugged at his creased jacket, ran a hand through his hair and conjured up his business card. ‘Muhammad ...”

“... not that of the wandering journalist, but that of the literate citizen in Reagan’s and – William Casey’s – America, a sensibility discovering the range and scope of numerous private entrepreneurial groups as they make America over into a private corporation conducting its activities as so many aggressive sales campaigns. No less than Miami, the ...”