“... startling to someone used to – say – Marxist criticism, or to the work of art historians like Michael Baxandall and Frances Yates. The emphases and conclusions differ – as they do between the essayists here – but the principle of balancing evidence intrinsic to the painting against material that lies outside the frame to make a critical account is the ...”

“... 12th century, on a church with its ‘boxes of gold and silver full of dead men’s bones’. A king might want to melt down that gold to pay soldiers. The wonder-seeking faithful prized the stuff inside: namely, dead bodies or pieces of them – bones, dust, scraps of blood-soaked cloth. So an even more puzzling question arises: why should the holy dead ...”

“... For him there was no such thing as a ruin. SUDBOURNE HALL. The house was demolished in 1951. Sir Michael Stanhope’s house had been rebuilt by James Wyatt for the 1st Marquess of Hertford, c.1784, a plain, stuccoed, three-storey affair, nine bays wide. Remodelled for Sir Richard Wallace (of the Wallace Collection), natural son of the 4th ...”

“... by drug dealers; George H.W. Bush used the case in his election campaign, during which he accused Michael Dukakis of being soft on crime. In November of the same year, Congress passed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, the opening salvo in the ‘War on Drugs’, which has done little to curb drug abuse and much to increase a national prison population that was already ...”

“... From the apostolic few who gathered in the basement of King School in Akron, Ohio, in June 1935, Alcoholics Anonymous has grown into the largest secular self-help organisation in the Western world. With its ten million members, it’s bigger than the Freemasons, the Rotarians, the TUC, the White Aryan Resistance, the Samaritans, the KKK, the Women’s Institute and – in terms of weekly attendance – the Church of England ...”

“... wrote a fulsome poem for the front of the book, paid for its publication, presented it to the King, and reviewed it in the Royal Society’s journal, which he himself edited. He made a profit of at least £10 out of the sales of the book. Few others got a look behind the scenes of this amazing work. Its impenetrability, and that of its author, became ...”

“... vulnerable.The flu wasn’t Spanish at all. The name stuck when in May 1918 the Spanish king, the prime minister and his entire cabinet all came down with it. In Madrid, it was known as the Naples Soldier after a catchy tune then in circulation, while French military doctors called it Disease 11. In Senegal it was Brazilian flu; in Brazil it was ...”

“... Baguette Bag (they formed a major plot point in Sex and the City), handed out actual baguettes. Michael Kors ran a pastrami cart (he really loves New York) and a Gucci osteria served cookies. Burberry, playing on its Englishness, offered cups of tea. Banana Republic did banana pudding. And so on. In return, the attendees took endless photographs and posted ...”

“... up the slopes towards the French positions. In his classic account of the war, the historian Michael Howard described what happened next:The field officers on their horses were the first casualties. The men on foot struggled forward against the chassepot fire as if into a hailstorm, shoulders hunched, heads bowed, directed only by the shouts of their ...”

“... parse and digest. Coetzee won his Booker Prizes for portrayals of South Africa (Life and Times of Michael K and Disgrace). Everett gained recognition for a novel about an African American novelist, Erasure (2001), and was included on this year’s Booker shortlist for The Trees, a counterfactual comedy set in 2018, in which Emmett Till returns to Mississippi ...”

“... a better understanding of her; she marries him and sails to England, where she is received by the king. The colony is as much the film’s subject as the love story: nature is turned over to agriculture, and the Indigenous Americans are degraded.The New World was another commercial let-down. It seems now as if Malick was on the brink of issuing a profound ...”

“... oral culture: folk songs, riddles, Anansi stories and especially the Psalms and Proverbs of the King James Bible. Johnson recalls these biblical cadences blending into the rhythms of everyday speech, and later into the language of reggae and dub poetry.In November 1963, Johnson went to join his mother, who had emigrated to England to work as a ...”

“... this, but the best is probably to begin with its dedication. The book is devoted to the memory of Michael Oakeshott – whose thought, Mount tells us, has left its traces, ‘no doubt sadly smudged’, on many of its pages. At first glance, the affinity between author and authority seems straightforward enough, for Oakeshott was widely held to be the most ...”

“... live among them, had the definite ring of an oxymoron. The vitality of Ackroyd (as of his friend Michael Moorcock) is on a 19th-century scale. He has made respectable the concept of the man of letters. And, much more than that, he has made it pay. Ackroyd also customised his own biography. We know what we are allowed to know and what we can learn, by ...”

“... all round the country, and the entertainer who had been spirited away somewhere between King’s Cross and Leeds had swarms of aspiring sound-alikes as far as the BBC transmitters could reach. The story of his disappearance made headlines in the national papers the following day. Posters went up in shop windows, and Peter Brough offered a reward of ...”