“... anecdote casting the artist in the role of perpetual adolescent. Nobody doubts that Dylan Thomas died of drink and a regressive, infantile personality: but the thing that is remembered about his last days is a remark (‘I’ve just had 18 straight whiskies, I think that’s the record’) which superbly typifies the kind of thing his public would ...”

“... on to become a terrific post-Chatterley best-seller. The Place of Dead Roads is published with a grant from the Arts Council: a double seal of Establishment approval and minority sales prospects. In a manner of speaking, Burroughs has finally arrived. Burroughs likes to kick off his fiction in deadpan documentary style, thereafter spiralling away into ...”

“... classical scholars who had received them, admiring the attitude of the 17th-century Greek scholar Thomas Gataker who refused a Cambridge doctorate because ‘like Cato the censor he would rather have people ask why he had no statue than why he had one.’ When he came across some self-critical words of T.E. Lawrence in Seven Pillars of Wisdom – ‘there was ...”

“... and her brother Leo, and a study of the relationship between Emily Dickinson and the abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson. The Impeachers is structured around brief, insightful sketches of the key actors in the titanic struggle over Reconstruction. It begins with the 43 ‘dramatis personae’, including high officials in the administration and ...”

“... her for a promise of safe conduct for her return to Scotland, via Dover. Elizabeth was slow to grant it; Mary was sure that if only they could meet in person, they would ‘satisfy each other much better than they can do by messages and ministers’. They exchanged portraits, a kind of flirtation. Mary sent Elizabeth verses; Elizabeth sent her a ...”

“... a hundred-odd to Galsworthy, the same quantity to Ford Madox Ford, ‘several dozen’ to Thomas Wise, an unspecified but obviously vast number to the agent Pinker, and so on. Moreover, the core collection of Jean-Aubry is unreliable, because of ‘unprofessional editing and omissions’, the latter caused by an understandable desire not to give ...”

“... divided between institutions that rigorously regiment and specialise (university departments, grant agencies, the Research Assessment Exercises, corporate laboratories) and those (far fewer) that offer select scholars and scientists a delirious year off from these constraints with excellent research support, and with the proviso that they participate in ...”

“... of him. Allon’s funeral was held in the small church at Berwick, near Lewes, decorated by Duncan Grant et al. He’d spoken about what he wanted from the occasion – ‘not a dry eye in the house’ – and the service was scripted as ruthlessly as the final scenes of Brief Encounter, with the one deliberate aim of reducing everyone in the huge congregation ...”

“... be. ‘In the end, there is only this: she is the little girl in the moose’s antlers.’ Alice Thomas Ellis would sympathise with many of these bleak insights. Her weekly sketches of domestic disorganisation used to appear in the Spectator and are now published in the Tablet. A new collection of these pieces, Home Life Four, reflects the most engaging ...”

“... that seamlessly combined white power fanaticism with anti-communism. In 1977, Beam received a grant from the state of Texas to build a simulated Vietnamese rice paddy in swampland near Houston: here, he trained recruits as young as 13 to kill an imaginary enemy. Four years later a promising opportunity presented itself. A number of South Vietnamese ...”

“... and Nixon in three (1987-91). And though William McFeely won a Pulitzer Prize for his Grant (1981), that did not deter Jean Edward Smith from publishing a massive new Grant (2001), which some politicians have been reading with furtive pleasure because it finds that Gilded Age Administration less corrupt than had ...”

“... traders’ India. White men happily took up hookahs, flowing dresses and local lovers. His father, Thomas Brooke, a prosperous High Court judge in the service of the East India Company, had a local mistress and an illegitimate child, for whom he provided in his will, and Mrs Brooke was herself almost certainly illegitimate and may have been Eurasian. ...”

“... they were published with immense success in 1590 as illustrations (engraved by Theodor de Bry) to Thomas Harriot’s Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia – suggests that what was made as a record was used as advertising. The Report was issued in German, Latin and French editions as well as in English. That Harriot and White’s book was ...”

“... admirers have ranged from Virginia Woolf to Derek Walcott, from Robert Frost to W.H. Auden, from Thomas Hardy to T.S. Eliot, not to speak of confrères such as Edward Thomas, Rupert Brooke and Henry Newbolt. Ezra Pound, although savage in his denunciation of the use of idioms or phrases such as ‘dim lands of ...”

“... Citizen. In a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times, on receiving the MacArthur ‘Genius’ grant, Rankine acknowledged as much: ‘To me, the getting of this honour is … the culture saying: “We have an investment in dismantling white dominance in our culture. If you’re trying to do that, we’re going to help you” … The MacArthur is given to ...”