“... Likenesses at the Royal West of England Academy. Many poets and writers are in the exhibition: William Empson, Seamus Heaney, Charles Tomlinson, Salman Rushdie, Robert Lowell, Geoffrey Hill. The only other bare feet besides Walcott’s belong to a corpse on a dissecting table in front of Keith Simpson, the forensic pathologist. An illegible name-tag is ...”

“... Cuban citizens needed official permission, in the form of the so-called tarjeta blanca, the ‘white card’, to travel abroad. It wasn’t as restrictive as is often claimed. Between 2000 and 2012, 99.4 per cent of applications for the white card were approved, and 941,953 Cubans travelled abroad: 12 per cent chose not ...”

“... they powered Thomas Malory’s 15th-century Morte D’Arthur, created the Victorian vogue for William Morris’s ‘Defence of Guenevere’ (1858) and Tennyson’s Idylls of the King (1859-85), and returned in T.H. White’s Once and Future King (1958) and the Disney movie based on it in 1963, with a dozen successors ...”

“... Life of LBJ reminds one, is something else again. Whereas British political biography, with the (white) elephantine exception of Martin Gilbert’s Churchill is, almost as a matter of professional pride, a one-volume affair, there is a well established American tradition of monumentalism, based, it seems, on the assumption that a blockbusting person requires ...”

“... a phthalo green so fucking intense that just a teardrop of this stuff could colonise a blob of white. Michael Boone’s father was a butcher in the small town of Bacchus Marsh near Melbourne – hence his son’s moniker – and Michael is a provincial rebel, determined to remind the metropolis of his raggedness. In Bacchus Marsh, a German art teacher ...”

“... soon took up with the British security services too. The head of Scotland Yard’s Special Branch, William Melville, worked closely with the Okhrana’s top man in Paris, Petr Ivanovich Rachkovsky, whose many state-sanctioned crimes probably included overseeing the creation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Morris thinks Melville wasn’t to know about ...”

“... self-help in the house but the only non-library book of autobiography was I Haven’t Unpacked by William Holt, who had got away from the dark, satanic mills by buying a horse and riding through England. The Armley library was at the bottom of Wesley Road, the entrance up a flight of marble steps under open arches, through brass-railed swing doors panelled in ...”

“... she is able to sustain our interest in their dramas, pleasures, quarrels and sorrows long after ‘William’ (as Barker always calls him – even, irritatingly, ‘our William’) has ceased to write wonderful poetry. In fact, she manages to make an intriguing sub-narrative out of his wife’s and his sister’s ...”

“... lifetime tenure, and sometimes that is a literal description: the ultra-conservative Chief Justice William Rehnquist died on the job in 2005 at the age of eighty, and so did his ideological ally Antonin Scalia in 2016, aged 79. More recently, the court’s indefatigable liberal standard-bearer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, died in post aged 87, a mere six and a half ...”

“... of course, the two recent books on Gerard Manley Hopkins, one by Robert Martin and one by Norman White, but there has been nothing comprehensive. There is now. In Robert Bridges Catherine Phillips tells us everything we could reasonably wish to know about his life. About his poetry there is more still to be said, but one of the merits of this book is that ...”

“... he strode into the building and claimed the job, introducing himself as all-American ‘Harry White’. In his time off from the tie factory, Harry’s taste for magic grew into an obsession; and once the rest of his family had joined him in New York, he and his younger brother, Theo, nicknamed Dash, started working on an act together. Harry was ...”

“... certainty’. Some even saw in its climate of extremes the foundations of a higher civilisation. William Cronon, in his magisterial book Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, refers to Alexander von Humboldt’s theory that great cities were possible only in regions with an average annual isotherm of about 50° F, and explains that ‘the ...”

“... peremptory: ‘Eve he supposed had as much sense as I had and she wore no clothes at all!!!’ A white silk dress was duly ordered (Mr C. graciously agreed to pay) and arrived properly ‘high and longsleeved’ and then, ‘on the very day of the ball, was sent back to be cut down to the due pitch of indecency’. Jane’s country-mouse observations on the ...”

“... was supposed to meet her, was late. When she did arrive she produced a particularly unflattering white satin dress, which she made Caroline change into, and then applied liberal quantities of rouge to the princess’s face. It was either this unfortunate first appearance (for Caroline, if no beauty, had her points), or the fact that she regarded washing ...”

“... worked but would destroy him if it went wrong; then by secretly recording his conversations in the White House in the hope of storing up material to use against his opponents but in fact only providing evidence of his own malfeasance. Nixon belongs to a type well known in horse-racing, who would actually prefer to win a race by crooked means. He was, in that ...”