“... bill and ‘coughs up $100,000’ for expenses. All the lesser characters echo his obsession. John Adams, the first vice-president, thought his salary (a quarter of the president’s) ‘a sort of "curiosity"’; it has not been recorded, Vidal writes, whether ‘Adams wept’ about his sorry financial condition. Vidal is tapping one of the trustiest ...”

“... Between 1938 and 1940, the Italian-American writer John Fante published three books. The first two – Wait until Spring, Bandini (1938) and Ask the Dust (1939) – were novels; the third, Dago Red (1940), was a collection of short stories. All three were well received. Ask the Dust disconcerted some of its reviewers, but Bandini was admired by James Farrell and Steinbeck praised Dago Red ...”

“... of the Exchequer was inevitable: but the government decision against this project in 1968 took a surprisingly painful toll in disillusioned nuclear physicists. This long-drawn-out conflict not only pushed the science policy machine into a permanently defensive posture against Treasury economisers: it also demolished the notion of a united front for ...”

“... John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, one of the original ‘amorous sons of Wadham’, perhaps took part in writing an obscene farce called Sodom. Dr Walker drily observes that ‘to assert this twenty years ago would have damaged Rochester’s reputation as much as to deny it today ...”

“... began when the owner of the château asked her if she had ever heard of an artist named Gwen John. She had indeed, and, like many others, considered her work to be of a more consistently high quality than that of her famous brother. The man at the château had never heard of Augustus, but on hearing that Gwen was highly regarded in England he brought out ...”

“... Toward the end of their correspondence, which spanned years 1851-79, John Ruskin, who hitherto had addressed Thomas Carlyle more or less in terms of deferential formality (‘Dear Mr Carlyle’), suddenly shifted to ‘Dearest Papa’, signing himself ‘Ever your loving disciple-son’. Whatever the immediate reasons for the change, it simply made explicit Ruskin’s steady conception of his relation to Carlyle, the older man by 24 years ...”

“... of them are plotting murder. Nutshell-Hamlet’s father is a poet and publisher of poets called John Cairncross, living away from the marital home in hopes of a reconciliation with Trudy, though all he achieves is easier access to her bed for his rival. (The surname has a noble ring, though it is made up of two things that can mark a grave.) The house is a ...”

“... how Stephen Dedalus, disowning his own parent, searches for another father. Portrait of John Stanislaus Joyce by Patrick Tuohy (1923) Just as Oscar Wilde began to become himself the year after his father’s death, when he was 21, and John Butler Yeats managed, figuratively, to kill his son by going into exile in ...”

“... a way with titles (which have got better still over the years). During the Seventies MacSweeney took his poems on the run, publishing a fugitive series of pamphlets from Blacksuede Boot Press, but his Odes from Trigram in 1978 were a new and estranging poetry, which called for very adroit reading. Ranter, a sequence from 1985, created another ...”

“... Church of the Latin Rite, not least that section which remained loyal to the bishop of Rome. John O’Malley illustrates the room in his superb new history of the Council of Trent: the nave of the church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Trent, a bishopric in the foothills of the Dolomites. In that grand setting, seated on an amphitheatre specially erected for ...”

“... peace with one another, and will not for a different faith or a change of churches shed blood. It took the rest of Europe a century and more to learn that lesson, and Anjou himself, as King Henri III of France, would be stabbed to death by a religious fanatic – as it happens, a Catholic. But it would have been misleading to have left the story in 1573 (let ...”

“... appears to have pervaded Getty’s personal life. After a paternity suit had had to be settled, he took to requiring women he went to bed with to sign a release just before the event. Each divorce seemed to bring a meaner and more humiliating squabble over money. He tended to ignore the four sons produced by his marriages; when he did notice them, it was ...”

“... of distracting teaching and administrative chores? Again, the Provost of University College London took a lead by circulating to his heads of department a letter instructing that colleagues who had not been helpful in the 1992 exercise might be given more teaching, reassigned to such tasks as fire officer and, in incorrigible cases, have it hinted to them that ...”

“... that mentioned revolt or longing for a lost fatherland (such as Bellini’s Norma): but they took place in 1847-48, just ahead of the 1848 revolutions, not in 1842-43. So far was Verdi in those earlier years from chafing under the ‘Austrian yoke’ that he dedicated the scores of Nabucco and I Lombardi to two Austrian archduchesses in turn, one of them ...”

“... French literature, the 11th-century poem of ‘La Vie de Saint Alexis’ is the story of a man who took his first step on the road to sainthood by deserting his wife on their wedding-night. (In a properly frosty chapter on the Surrealist cult of Sade in the 1930s, Carolyn Dean comes within three italic characters of making the volume’s one joke, when she has ...”