“... All actors want to play Disraeli, except fat ones,’ the American filmmaker Nunnally Johnson said. ‘It’s such a showy part – half Satan, half Don Juan, man of so many talents, he could write novels, flatter a queen, dig the Suez Canal. Present her with India. You can’t beat that, it’s better than Wyatt Earp ...”

“... There, there’ – before he discovers that the word means ‘to vault or arch any thing. Well said, carrie away the bookes againe,’ rather than ‘to fornicate with’. The joke was probably worth the delay, which mimes its readers’ prurient flutter at the sexy-sounding word. Sterne may have picked up a few tips from Harington. The main reason ...”

“... statistical methods as the old philological scholars were of their textual criticisms. Having said which, Bastardy and its Comparative History must be read as it stands: we must wrestle with the book like Jacob with the angel, and a fine reward awaits the victorious. For this is a book of exceptional interest, which leads its reader to pose the problem of ...”

“... of the visual complexity, speed and energy of the city streets. Estes is often associated with Edward Hopper, and the influence is evident in some of his earliest work, but by the mid-1960s, it was waning. In Estes’s Horn and Hardart Automat (1967) day-lit multiple reflecting surfaces bring an apartment block, traffic and signage pouring through the ...”

“... there a sense of unselfconscious connection between painter and subject, though even here Pasmore said that he was cocking a snook at Renoir’s sugary nudes. His career would seem to have owed something to the inferiority complex that afflicted British art and architecture in the 20th century and which lingers still; the preference for any work that shows ...”

“... really is in Texas.) He is a singular artist, at once folk, Conceptual and Pop, an unlikely son of Edward Hopper, Marcel Duchamp and James Dean. Two retrospectives – a small show of photographs, a large one of drawings – are at the Whitney Museum until 26 September (the drawings will travel to Washington and LA over the next year); a collection of notes ...”

“... begun to feel like a weekly basis. More striking still, perhaps, are the new forms of support act. Edward Mendelson describes his critical study of Mrs Dalloway as a guide to the novel’s ‘inner life’. Mark Hussey’s is subtitled ‘Biography of a Novel’. What next for the literary masterpiece, one wonders. Birthday cards? A retirement gong?Daunted by ...”

“... flourishes. The poster for the exhibition is Holbein’s portrait of the Prince of Wales, later Edward VI; he’s not the weed that he’s normally pictured but a big solid bully of a baby, the image of his father. On the Underground R. says he’s never known a poster so persistently defaced, the child’s brutal look seeming to irritate people. One poster ...”

“... impulse’ and ‘moral insanity’ had allowed the would-be assassin of Queen Victoria, Edward Oxford, to escape the gallows three years previously. The doctors, for their part, criticised the M’Naghten Rules for failing to take any account of the unconscious. What, they asked, was the law to do with murderers who were rational, conscious of ...”

“... guests talking about Nietzsche. ‘Elbert Hubbard did all your reading for you,’ the publishers said. ‘His book will make you so well informed – you’ll never need to feel embarrassed or uncomfortable in company again.’ Of late, the uneducated, and even the educated, have been well served, for the familiar thick tomes of ...”

“... journal ArabLit, nearly all of them complained about being stereotyped. The Syrian poet Fady Jomar said that he now ‘refuses to talk about being a refugee at all’. Ramy al-Asheq, a Palestinian-Syrian poet and journalist, said that Europeans gravitated to ‘sexy stories’, that they wanted refugees to ‘show us how ...”

“... poet, is true of time. And saying so to some Means nothing; others it leaves Nothing to be said. Such poetry does not ‘say so’ but leaves ‘nothing to be said’. Like time, it collaborates only with silence, always invoked in Larkin’s poetic medium. Donald Davie has an expressive metaphor for the other kind ...”

“... escape from it, and so she can escape into new difficulties: ‘“My head’s free at last!” said Alice in a tone of delight, which changed into alarm in another moment.’ She may well be privy to a secret Carroll confided to his diary in 1855: ‘There is, I verily believe, a sensation of pain in the realisation of our highest pleasures, knowing that ...”

“... future. The military details will be familiar to many from school history lessons. Prince Charles Edward Stuart, the Young Pretender, having overcome the doubts of some of his own commanders, marched south from Derby to confront the hastily mustered Hanoverian army under the direct command of George II. As in previous engagements, the numerical superiority of ...”

“... hit Frieda and wanted to exterm-inate whole races; Virginia Woolf was a pretentious snob who said horrible things about the plebeian Joyce, and about the girls who worked at Woolworths; James Kelman acted like a barbarian at the Booker dinner, and so on. Most of these commentators imagine themselves to be writing a form of intellectual history when they ...”