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“... here are children; sometimes they have been seen by children, too, as in the case of a certain William, who was sent away from his home in Apt after a series of violent incidents and died in 1211 after a brawl. On several nights not long after his death, he appeared, naked except for some rags, to his 11-year-old girl cousin, who had been very fond of ...”

“... Janey Morris, whose remarkable appearance was so close to Rossetti’s pictures of her that Henry James was unsure whether she was an original or a copy, the Macdonald sisters, though strikingly attractive, were not in the heavy-eyed big-haired vein. If they were, as suggested, the models for Burne-Jones’s The King’s Daughters then a great deal must have ...”

“... The sea was, after all, the fastest and most economic mode of travel in the pre-modern world. As William Dalrymple points out in The Golden Road, ships could carry much larger cargoes than camels and sail around wars, blockades and ambushes.Dalrymple’s own odyssey is equally laden to the gunwales with pages of astounding illustrations and arresting ...”

“... book on the KGB and fairly early in Harlot’s Ghost its eponymous figure, ‘Harlot’, a James Angleton composite, says of the Agency that ‘our real duty is to become the mind of America.’ How else to link the Mafia, Marilyn Monroe, the media, the Congress, Hollywood and all the other regions of CIA penetration? ‘The mind of America’. A ...”

“... stylised composure; and Whitman’s composure finds its equal among American writers only in Henry James. With majestic aloofness, he likes, as he says early in Song of Myself, to be ‘both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it’. And like the games James plays in The Turn of the Screw, Whitman’s are ...”

“... high-profile exemplar of this style was the magnate, George Walker; once, according to James Morton, an ‘ally’ of Billy Hill and Eddie Chapman, later a frequently puffed adornment of the Thatcherite open market culture.) There is nothing new in the concept, quality tailoring bonded over primal naughtiness. It has been spelled out frequently in ...”

“... James Bond was a well-known ornithologist. His Birds of the West Indies is an unusually rich source of names. According to Bond, the Sooty Tern is also known as the Egg Bird; Booby; Bubí; Hurricane Bird; Gaviota Oscura; Gaviota Monja; Oiseau Fou; Touaou. But when the keen birdwatcher Ian Fleming needed a name that sounded as ordinary as possible, he had to look no further than the title page of Bond’s great work ...”

“... Britain (until 17 September) there are writings, culled from various sources, by Julian Barnes, James Fenton, Susan Sontag, William Boyd, Bruce Chatwin, Bruce Bernard and Colm Tóibín (Barnes has also made a loan to the exhibition). Some are affectionately biographical. Comparisons between Hodgkin’s art of memory and ...”

“... present us with another America, of main streets, front yards, soft, riverine light: home to James Dean, Ronald Reagan and Mark Twain, three utterly dissimilar characters but emblematic for Tice of a certain idea of America. The images in Lincoln at first seem something else entirely. In fact, through these photographs of memorials of Abraham Lincoln in ...”

“... for more than twenty years and last January wrote a loopy letter to this journal, blaming James Fenton and myself for once queering his pitch at the New Statesman. ‘Effete onanist’ was one of the things he said about me. About himself he wrote with even more feeling: ‘In those days, I had no revolutionary ideology to sustain me, nothing but a ...”

“... checking – she didn’t. For the earliest verified usage, we have to wait for the scholar-critic William Taylor in 1797, and even he had his doubts. He disliked ‘self-biography’, coined the previous year by Isaac D’Israeli, because ‘it is not very usual in English to employ hybrid words partly Saxon and partly Greek: yet autobiography would have ...”

“... of fiction.’ This remark probably arose from his habitual disrespect for, or worry about, Henry James. The Ambassadors is given more attention in Aspects of the Novel than any other novel, except possibly Gide’s Les Faux-Monnayeurs, though the intention is in neither case to praise or to admire; and the Commonplace Book contains mildly disparaging remarks ...”

“... questions. The tale of Hylas, for instance, is one of the better-known episodes, thanks to John William Waterhouse’s painting with its loved-up, spaced-out nymphs. Casually, Apollonius drops a bombshell: Hercules had adopted the boy, he says, after killing his father. He alludes to some dispute over an ox, but has no time to explain: ‘these tales would ...”

“... didn’t deter Teruzzi from making an impulsive visit to Varese, where Lilliana was rehearsing for William Tell, and proposing to her. She rebuffed him: ‘Please, I think of you as a friend.’ He left, furious.It would be nice to imagine that this cultured American had woken up to the unpleasantness of her suitor’s politics, but that wasn’t, alas, the ...”

“... continued to his death, can be tested when compared with its lack in his nearest English rival, William Walton, born 11 years before him. Walton’s career began in brilliance and ended in conformity. Britten told Walton that hearing the latter’s Viola Concerto, in 1931, was a turning point in his musical life. In the late 1920s, Walton was the great hope ...”