“... There were closer friends who shunned him: Beardsley, for instance, who owed him so much; John Gray, an early lover, for whose Silverpoints, prettiest of Nineties poetry-books, Wilde had paid; Lilly Langtry, to whom he had, at one time, brought a daily lily, and who claimed to have sent him money without having actually done so. Beerbohm did not spurn ...”

“... In the first chapter of Rembrandt’s Enterprise, Professor Alpers devotes much attention to a small etching of 1655. This, she says, depicts a goldsmith in his shop just putting the finishing touches to a figural group representing a woman (Charity, or Caritas) with two children. While his right hand works with a hammer to fasten the metal to its base, the artist lovingly embraces the women with a huge left hand ...”

“... been central to the sense of what made people different in America, ever since the English Captain John Smith began exploring the rivers of Virginia and got captured by the Indians. These are symptoms, not of a single life, but of a whole ...”

“... He parcelled out his Beagle specimens to white-collar naturalists: to zoological craftsmen like John Gould (who reciprocated by christening a new rhea darwinii after him). Darwin modelled his Zoology on Humboldt’s Zoologie, acting as taskmaster and paymaster chivvying a Gradgrind work-force. Not that he was incapable of such work himself. Although in ...”

“... consumption in eight different countries. In particular, there is a very full and clear account by John Shearman of the complex building history of the chapel, its liturgical function, the programme of the 15th-century decorations, and of Raphael’s tapestries. There is also an article by Michael Hirst which subjects to scrutiny the fragile sheets from the ...”

“... was active in her twenties and thirties in radical political circles, and along with her husband, John Fenwick, an Irish patriot and member of the London Corresponding Society, became friends with William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft around the time of the French Revolution. One of the few – haunting – pieces of biographical information we have about ...”

“... as another form of inter-species conflict. For centuries, Jews had been likened to animals: John Chrysostom had placed them at ‘the level of the lusty goat and the pig’; in the influential 19th-century anti-Semitic novel Biarritz, they were described as having ‘the tenacity of a snake, the cunning of a fox, the look of a falcon, the memory of a ...”

“... English versions of the books of secrets could be picked up from dealers like the pharmacist John Hester, whose shop acted as an important centre of recipes and useful lore, while on stage Marlowe had Faustus, an avid reader of these books, abandon law and divinity for the science which gave him the secret of universal mastery. Works on ...”

“... of his own disappearance into fiction. As he watches the rehearsals for I Am a Camera, the play John van Druten made from the Isherwood material, Isherwood thinks a good deal – sometimes comically, sometimes sentimentally – about the relation of art to life. In writing Goodbye to Berlin I destroyed a certain portion of my real past. I did this ...”

“... uses every available one to allow us to glimpse a life of companionship of the kind to which John Milton aspired in a scholar’s marriage: his wife’s chamber was placed next to his study in the house which he most frequently occupied, ‘a proximity’, MacCulloch says, ‘which not all scholars have welcomed in their ...”

“... romancing the wonderful indifference of nature and its heroic explorers. Indeed, the loss of Sir John Franklin and his party during his search for the Northwest Passage in the 1840s only further fuelled the imaginative drama of the ice. Lady Jane Franklin, reminding the nation of her husband’s heroism with her own heroic bearing, whipped up sympathy and ...”

“... shaped by Lincoln, Carnegie, and King to the republic of exclusion prophesied by Cotton Mather, John D. Rockefeller and George Lincoln Rockwell. The mask was accepted by Dylan, but worn more lightly. In ‘Lo and Behold!’ it floats just in front of the singer’s face.The most delicate and intense of the basement songs are like a play about the old ...”

“... underlying, law on which economics have no purchase; here, he says: ‘I take my stand with the John Stuart Mill of On Liberty (1859), the classic statement of classical liberalism. On Liberty argues that every person is entitled to the maximum liberty – both personal and economic – consistent with the liberty of every other person in the ...”

“... and they do keep cropping up. I think there’s more than a little Pynchon floating around John Kennedy Toole, whose A Confederacy of Dunces is a book nearly as bloated as its protagonist; Don DeLillo’s social, um, satires owe more than a little to Pynchon’s work; and in a recent essay in Harper’s magazine the young novelist Jonathan Franzen ...”

“... monarchs, like most mortals, have scarcely been individuals of unimpeachable character – King John? Henry VIII? James II? Compared with many previous sovereigns, the failings of the Windsors which Kelley describes with such evident relish seem relatively harmless, and exactly what one might expect of any isolated, privileged, undereducated, self-indulgent ...”