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“... Rome, from the Middle Ages to the 19th century. The Dictionary is the brain-child of Sir Brinsley Ford, a collector of 17th and 18th-century art, a patron of living British painters, and in many ways a reincarnation of the ideal virtuoso and Grand Tourist. He was first drawn to the subject by the Roman landscapes of Richard Wilson; published a book on ...”

“... the more Cooper earned the more rapaciously he was hounded by such associates as the lawyer Robert Sedgwick, a one-time friend who extracted exorbitant amounts of interest on his loans, and the unsavoury duo of Thomas Bridgen and William Holt Averell, who ended up acquiring, by various devious stratagems, much of the land and property that had made up ...”

“... some time after Laurence Sterne’s death in 1768 that this passage was itself plagiarised from Robert Burton’s attack on literary imitators in his introduction to The Anatomy of Melancholy. ‘As apothecaries,’ Burton observed, ‘we make new mixtures every day, pour out of one vessel into another … Again, we weave the same web still, twist the same ...”

“... on his khaki shirt: he is wearing the B.P. hat – to which American boys are fully entitled. Robert Baden-Powell, a skilled dress-designer, ordered those cowboy hats from the States in 1900 when he was kitting out his nurses and constables in Africa. B.P. has recorded: ‘They were known in the trade as “Boss of the Plains” or ...”

“... to have time to achieve an understanding of what he was really up to. In some ways he resembles Ford Madox Ford, though Ford was much more prolific, indeed embarrassingly so. Both were dedicated to the art of fiction; and Ford also died a failure and ...”

“... is something rather dogged about some aspects of the Pre-Raphaelite work ethic. In April 1855, Ford Madox Brown wrote in his diary about the drawing for Work: ‘This is now to me a species of intoxication,’ he exclaims. ‘When I drew in the poor little vixen girl pulling her brother’s hair, I quite growled with delight.’ This entry is interesting ...”

“... speaks for is one that most of us, gratefully or not, are ready to think defunct: the Britain of Ford Madox Ford in 1913-15, which was host to Wyndham Lewis’s earliest paintings, to the sculpture of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, and to Ezra Pound’s first translations from the Chinese – a Britain that we may think of as ...”

“... Delmore Schwartz, Truman Capote (on Kerouac: ‘that’s not writing, that’s type-writing’), Robert Brustein and James Dickey (‘Howl is the skin of Rimbaud’s Une Saison en Enfer thrown over the conventional maunderings of one type of American adolescent, who has discovered that machine civilisation has no interest in his having read Blake’). Riding ...”

“... used to call ‘the grade A crumpet’ until at last senility takes hold. (In James’s phrase, Ford Madox Ford, himself neither young nor pretty, had the grade A crumpet ‘coming at him like kamikazes’.) Germaine Greer may say, uncontroversially, that ‘many a man who was attractive and amusing at 20 is a pompous old ...”

“... by landing some extraordinary coup, as in 1956, when it managed the first public offering of Ford Motor Company shares. But most of the time its business activities were well below the threshold of public interest. In 1929, however, seduced by the mirage of ever rising stock prices, Goldman strayed from its traditional underwriting business and was among ...”

“... greatly exceeds that of the unfashionable old-style giants of manufacturing: General Motors, Ford, Dupont and Kodak. In the course of rising from very little to their present heights, the New Titans have made several billionaires and hundreds of millionaires among early investors, while very substantially increasing the wealth of an even larger number of ...”

“... affiliated with the Centre for American Progress, who has called for military intervention to oust Robert Mugabe. It’s not just Americans: Michael Ignatieff ardently supported the invasion of Iraq in the name of humanitarian values. The inescapable Bernard-Henri Lévy was at the fore in demanding Nato go to war against Gaddafi. (Lévy has ‘moved on’ to ...”

“... The first stop is a scandal in Swinging London. In February 1967 police arrested Mick Jagger and Robert Fraser (a prominent art dealer) for drug possession. Based on a press photograph of Jagger and Fraser in a police van, Swingeing London 67 (1968-69) is blurred, its colours lurid. The two celebrities, who otherwise thrive on our gaze, here attempt to ...”

“... abomination and the man who invented it should be shot. This point is, after all, forcibly made in Robert Metz’s Reflections in a Bloodshot Eye, a much fuller and more frightening account of Paley’s career, and a book which, incidentally, CBS employees are forbidden to carry onto the premises. (By CBS’s standards, this is not particularly ...”

“... become a sleek and efficient vehicle on which glitterati Buddhists such as Richard Gere, Harrison Ford and the noxious Steven Seagal hitch regular rides. The Chinese occupation of Tibet has become the highest-profile colonial issue in the global consciousness, and a considerable weight about the neck of the CCP. The anti-China lobbies in both the Clinton and ...”