“... half-Jewish background and made her only foray into political journalism in order to rebuke Pope Paul VI for being tactless to Golda Meir. ‘All the more since I discovered myself to be a Catholic animal,’ she wrote in 1963, ‘am I a Gentile Jewess.’ When Spark was starting out, in the late 1940s, she was determined to avoid the ‘slop and ...”

“... Here she distinguished herself from her contemporaries: poets like Robert Creeley, Jack Spicer and Paul Blackburn often harked back to fraternal tropes of the knight, troubadour, jongleur. Never king. Guest’s origins were anything but kingly: born in North Carolina in 1920, she was shuffled around from town to town in ...”

“... the Company created a sizeable territorial state, first in eastern and southern India, then in the north and west. The morality of what was being done was under challenge, however. Indian rulers and other elites often directed sarcastic barbs at Company Bahadur (or the Honourable Company), that rapacious warlord masquerading as a merchant. In Britain, the ...”

“... adventure (they had known each other three months, we had known each other nine).’ Jane and Paul Bowles are always on the move – so are she and John. Zelda and Virginia Woolf had debilitating periods and headaches – she does, too. How far can she go? In one scene, she looks at Simone Weil. ‘I am Simone Weil,’ she declares, ‘although Simone ...”

“... doubt because the combination of glass façades and inadequate underfloor heating meant that the north side of the building froze while the south was like a hothouse. A difference in temperature of as much as 30ºC from one side to the other not only made it unpleasant to inhabit, it had the effect, as Pevsner pointed out, of warping the structural metal ...”

“... new marble monument ‘to the victims of terrorism, 1968-2007’ in Plaza Angel González, in the north-west of the city. The victims of ETA and Islamic extremism can be remembered, but not the victims of the Spanish government. Nearby, some anti-fascist graffiti had been daubed over with the legend ‘Crew 38’, a neo-Nazi sign in yellow and red, alongside ...”

“... is to be turned back, as if after a long absence, into a human being.’ So wrote Nicole Krauss. Paul Auster ranked the book with Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina: ‘wrenching, beautiful, unforgettable’. Grossman’s American publisher called it ‘one of the very greatest novels I shall have the privilege of publishing … When critics look back at the ...”

“... in which the living dead, vexed by exclusion from globalising affluence, rise up and take over North London. There has been no let-up in the despondency since then. One hears repeatedly of the ‘Saturday Night Massacre’ (Australians vote on Saturdays), and the Labor Party has obligingly fallen apart into Lilliputian factions. Even worse, the elder ...”

“... Like many other plutocrats who are now remembered as great collectors, J. Paul Getty began acquiring works of art in a serious way when he began to die – that is to say, in his forties (he was born in 1892), which is when most of us start thinking up ways of not thinking about mortality. He bought glamorous pieces of French furniture and decorative art, a field in which it is relatively easy to buy reliable advice ...”

“... when the dominant Di Lauro clan faced a schism in the depressed suburb of Secondigliano, two miles north of central Naples. ‘To follow the feud I’d managed to get hold of a radio capable of picking up police frequencies. So riding my Vespa I’d arrive at the scene pretty much at the same time as the squad cars.’ Saviano stays glued to that radio night ...”

“... story of his singularity was repeated so often that in 2014 his biographers Martin Lee-Browne and Paul Guinery could still claim that ‘Delius would spend his life composing music that bore no relationship to anything, good or bad, that had been written before.’Delius has been perceived this way in part because he wrote music that was not easily associated ...”

“... and snuff manufacturer (‘chairman of Sir Walter Scott’s Fine Border Snuff, 2012-, chairman of North Pennine Hunt 2008-’). Google suggests that Sir John is a rather small fish even in the small pond that is British snuff manufacture, though he has another claim to fame: between 2000 and 2003 he appeared with Clarissa Dickson Wright in a BBC series about ...”

“... called her ‘the smouldering, velvet-voiced, wanton-mouthed femme fatale of Algiers’.With its North African setting and ambivalent male lead, Algiers was one of the main inspirations for Casablanca. Warner Bros wanted a ‘foreign girl’ for the part of Ilsa, and their first choice was Lamarr. Louis B. Mayer, however, wouldn’t loan her out from ...”

“... for all departments of the school’. As well as obviously practical considerations, such as north light for painting studios, Mackintosh and Keppie improved on or introduced features including a gallery for the display of students’ work and congenial spaces for meeting ‘between the hours of study’. It was the consequent need for widely differing ...”

“... and the rhythms of jazz and blues. Through New Beacon Books, a radical bookshop and publisher in North London, Johnson met the Trinidadian poet and activist John La Rose, who became his mentor. He was also introduced to Caribbean intellectuals including Brathwaite, Andrew Salkey and Sam Selvon.With Selvon’s encouragement, Johnson abandoned his attempts to ...”