“... world’. Berenson’s recorded utterances sound all too self-consciously sagacious. ‘Young John Carter Brown, who one day was to become director of the National Gallery of Art’, came with a plan ‘to prepare for a museum career by first taking a business course’. Berenson urged him to ‘look, look, look, until you are blind with looking, and out ...”

“... Davy, and lay on his innocent life the burdens of their love, need or cupidity, are his father, John Chadwick, his mother, Dawn Chadwick, and their old friend (or acceptable enemy, depending how you read it), William Nelson. These people are all failures, all refugees, all victims. Chadwick is a failed stockbroker. Nelson is a man in what used to be known ...”

“... Murray at his very best. ‘Louvres’ is a marvellous, witty, tropical-Oz poem, as if the mind of John Donne had been reborn and Entirely re-processed by the experience of growing up in some place like Brisbane. ‘The Edgeless’ is something of a puzzle poem, to which the solution may be – I’m not sure – a word that occurs nowhere in the ...”

“... about the size and capability of the enemy forces. A day or two before the ‘invasion’, Sir John Glubb informed Azzam Pasha, Secretary-General of the Arab League, that the Zionists had 65,000 trained men. Azzam was surprised by this but replied: ‘I expect it will be all right. I have arranged to get up seven hundred men from Libya.’ On being asked ...”

“... that these rebellions amount to much. They manifest themselves as the high seriousness of trivia (John Baldessari’s alphabetical list of the contents of his files of movie stills); as Native American bluster and vanity; as halfbaked intellectualism; above all, as the intoning of feminist and other contemporary cultural pieties. (Yvonne Rainer: ‘At this ...”

“... came from industrialists and businessmen in Newcastle, Liverpool and Glasgow. Without the help of John Macadam and other Glaswegians, Mazzini might not have been able to mount the crucial expedition of his follower Rosolino Pilo to Sicily in 1860, which paved the way for Garibaldi and his Thousand. In Italy, the main charge against Mazzini has been that he ...”

“... almost to zero. There has never been a really successful modern recasting of Beowulf apart from John Gardner’s anarchic Grendel of 1971. (Michael Crichton’s disastrous and vainly Scandinavianising Eaters of the Dead has just been hauled back into print on the back of Jurassic Park.) The only Anglo-Saxon novels of any weight are about defeat and the end ...”

“... issue, and when the defence of the monarchy is left to such characters as Lords Rees-Mogg and St John of Fawsley, things are clearly getting rather serious. For the Prince and his advisers, the last redoubt of hope must be that in ten, twenty or thirty years’ time, this will all have blown over and been forgotten. Like most Princes of Wales, only more ...”

“... very hostile to any form of sex before marriage; James Mill had ‘a neurotic aversion to sex’; John Stuart Mill was ambivalent, but an early supporter of contraception; Bentham defended sexual pleasure while advocating abstention, and expressed himself in favour of both concubinage and – uniquely – of tolerance for homosexuality; Harriet Taylor looked ...”

“... for example, a head as simple as a bean seed.) Later there were American connections – in 1916 John Quinn began collecting his work; he knew the photographers Edward Steichen and Man Ray – and Romanian connections, which were maintained all his life. There is hardly a significant name which does not turn up in some context or other, from Picasso and the ...”

“... Lorraine Motel, Memphis, where Martin Luther King was assassinated on 3 April 1968; Dayton, where John Scopes was convicted in 1925 for teaching evolution to his biology class. Tennessee still stumbles under the burden of being a Civil War battleground (the East was loyal to the Union while the Midwest supported the Confederacy) and the state government works ...”

“... representative, ‘we cannot attack; the Jews might attack us in turn.’ In his memoirs, Sir John Glubb tells a rather similar anecdote. When the first independent Syrian government was formed after the 1939-45 war, the President asked for an estimate of the cost of a tank regiment. A British officer included a sum for a workshop. This was immediately ...”

“... a dandy. During his own time, he was clearly distinct from the macaronis or the incroyables. ‘If John Bull turns round to look at you, you are not well-dressed,’ he observed to Harriette Wilson, ‘but either too stiff, too tight, or too fashionable.’ Yet only a few years after the Beau’s creditors forced him into exile, the young dandies were wearing ...”

“... on them. The waterfront becomes a place of longing, and Mitchell writes of it as hauntingly as John Lee Hooker sang of it. In 1938 Mitchell was hired by Harold Ross as a staff writer for the New Yorker, though his first contribution to the magazine had been published in 1933. He took up with writers like Philip Hamburger, S.J. Perelman and James ...”

“... that his play-acting nature became a running joke in his movies. ‘You’re just not convincing, John,’ Grace Kelly tells him in To Catch a Thief, ‘You’re like an American character in an English movie. You just don’t talk the way an American tourist ought to talk.’ In Suspicion a crime writer laughs at him: ‘Look at the expression on his ...”