“... torrent of copy. He worked in conditions of creative chaos. Visiting him in his lodgings in 1823, Thomas Hood found him ‘quite at home in the midst of a German ocean of literature, in a storm, flooding all the floor, the table and the chairs – billows of books, tossing, tumbling, surging open’. His friend Matthew Hill recalled De Quincey turning up for ...”

“... later than Wilson, a black sailor from Boston, was being admired there as a sort of Greek god. Sir Thomas Lawrence found in him the combined perfections of the finest Classical statues, and Benjamin Robert Haydon wrote as enthusiastically about him as he did about the Parthenon Marbles. Having taken separate moulds of all parts of Wilson’s body, Haydon ...”

“... of a House of Commons committee chaired by the Quaker anti-slavery campaigner and philanthropist Thomas Fowell Buxton. The report was scathing about the treatment of Aborigines in the Australian colonies: It might be presumed that the native inhabitants of any land have an incontrovertible right to their own soil; a plain and sacred right, however, which ...”

“... first published poem and his death, Day-Lewis turned his hand to many literary tasks: he wrote 20 Nicholas Blake crime novels, three not very good ‘serious’ novels, and two boys’ adventure stories (one of which sold a quarter of a million copies): he translated Virgil (his Aeneid sold 400,000 copies in the United States alone): he gave lectures and ...”

“... same time something important has been lost. In his superb The Discovery of Pictorial Composition, Thomas Puttfarken points out that while composition was indeed central for Alberti, he rather oddly failed to provide any rules for what nowadays most people understand as the formal composition of a picture: the placing (or dispositio, to use the rhetorical ...”

“... may turn out to be more interesting than anti-slavery itself.The voyage of the Recovery provides Nicholas Rogers with his subject in Murder on the Middle Passage. The torture and murder of the unnamed girl off the coast of New Calabar has never received more than passing mention in histories of the anti-slavery movement, probably because it was a scandal ...”

“... cited Algarotti in a note: Pushkin’s various notes are not fully reproduced in D.M. Thomas’s new translation, nor in Sir Charles Johnston’s of 1981). But ambiguity has always surrounded the statue, along with its imperial subject. The city which stood for a modernised and liberalised Russia was said to have cost a hundred thousand lives in ...”

“... champion of Blenheim (1712), an eye-catching edition of Shakespeare by the future Whig laureate Nicholas Rowe (1709) and Addison’s heavily ideological tragedy Cato (1713), for which he paid more than £100 before the play was even performed. Godfrey Kneller’s Kit Cat Club portraits, clockwise from top left: Jacob Tonson (1717); Robert Walpole ...”

“... introduced to the reader in a bewildering welter of names: Dean Moran, Nick Yew, Gilbert Swinyard, Nicholas Briar, Floyd Chaceley, Neal Brose, Pete Redmarley, Ross Wilcox, Gary Drake, ‘Squelch’, Grant Burch, Philip Phelps, Lee Biggs, the Tookey brothers, Ant Little, Darren Croome. There are too many to take in, but almost all of them feature more or less ...”

“... would later call, applying the term to a very different kind of music, ‘entartete Kunst’. Thomas Mann was to satirise this attitude in Buddenbrooks, where Edmund Pfühl, the local organist, refuses to play excerpts from Tristan because of the music’s immorality: ‘I cannot play that, my dear lady!’ he says to Gerda, ‘I am your most devoted ...”

“... in the previous history of womankind.’ Opposition came, strangely, from the liberal scientist Thomas Henry Huxley. In reply to a telegram from Herbert Spencer asking support for the burial, Huxley wrote:   It can hardly be doubted that the proposal will be bitterly opposed, possibly with the raking up of past histories, which had better be ...”

“... the identity of a Muslim convert and writer, Essad Bey. Under that name, he wrote biographies of Nicholas II, Stalin and Mohammed as well as a book entitled Twelve Secrets of the Caucasus. As Nazification intensified, his German friends protected him and in due course he became Kurban Said. It was under this name that he wrote Ali and Nino, as well as ...”

“... 1918. No one knows war is coming, and with it the demise of the Austro-Hungarian Empire itself. As Nicholas Spice said, writing about the novel a year and a half or so ago (LRB, 16 October 1997), it is part of its genius to make us almost forget the catastrophe which hangs over it. ‘Almost but not quite: we experience the unreal and troubled somnolence of ...”

“... borderline of history and mythology has wasted more of the historian’s time.’ In his new book, Nicholas Higham cites neither opinion but certainly knows of them, and indeed, in the end, agrees with them (except about book titles). Still, whatever historians may say, legends of King Arthur have remained deep-rooted in popular imagination, giving rise to ...”

“... died. When they were children both he and his sister nearly died. Two of his boyhood friends, Thomas Linley and Giuseppe Maria Pallavicini, both of great musical talent, died before they reached 20. At 22, he stood by while his mother died. Four of his children died. Then, when he was not yet 36, Mozart died. An attack of acute rheumatic fever, it’s now ...”