“... Dramatists, contains a passage germane here: ‘A play of Shakespeare’s and a play of Henry Arthur Jones’s are essentially of the same type, the difference being that Shakespeare is very much greater and Mr Jones very much more skilful.’ This explains a lot when Updike criticises Degas’s ‘unevenness of rendering’: the woman’s dress in Woman ...”

“... nothing the man has done reveals quite so much of his egotism and his self-assurance,’ Arthur Deering wrote in Sir Samuel Ferguson, Poet and Antiquarian (1931). Perhaps nothing Muldoon has done reveals quite so much of his egotism and his self-assurance as his attempt to present in A-Z form the entirety of Irish literature in these four ...”

“... he went to direct the John Innes Horticultural Institution in 1910 (before the five years were up, Arthur Balfour’s benefaction had enabled the University to establish a permanent Professorship of Genetics, held by R.C. Punnett and then R.A. Fisher). MacKenzie is thus wrong in detail, but would in any case have been wrong to regard as necessarily ...”

“... thirteenth. Unlucky for some, but we’ll see how it turns out. He received the pint and drank a little more slowly, but half-way through it the temptation to be sick became a necessity that beat insistently against the back of his throat. He fought it off and struggled to light a cigarette. Smoke caught in his windpipe and he had just time enough to push ...”

“... ones/draped ones/costumed ones.’ ‘To a Gentleman Friend’ begins: ‘You fooled me you little floating worm.’ An apostrophe to men describes the feminine burden, but it can also be read as an artist’s statement:You are the steady rainThe looked-forsThe must-bes …We turn rainInto diamond fringesBlack cloudsInto pink tulle.Bloemink draws ...”

“... they are caricatures not travesties. The Duke of Wellington, whom she knew when he was still Arthur Wellesley, in fact comes out of it rather well: dry, but kind in his way, and unpompous. She found his famous taciturnity exasperating: ‘tried him on every subject I could muster’ but it was ‘very uphill work’. What she liked was his directness. On ...”

“... arms and armour, he stood in the chilly drizzle over what was said to be the grave of King Arthur and chanted an extended, improvised rabbinical-druidic hymn. It evoked the strength and innocence of Blake’s Albion and ended on what seemed to me, at the time, a strange remark, perhaps a challenge hurled from king to king: ‘British poets are ...”

“... that it has more Nobel laureates per capita than anywhere else in the world. The other winner was Arthur Lewis, who took the economics prize in 1979. Walcott won his in 1992. By happy coincidence they share a birthday and the government makes a fuss of its favoured children with a Nobel Laureate Week each January. Asked my business at the airport on my way to ...”

“... foreign adviser, a Swiss engineer named Alfred Ilg). Americans, Russians, Italians and even Arthur Rimbaud, the poet turned arms dealer, came to do business with the king of Shoa. There had been Italians in Ethiopia from much earlier, mainly missionaries like Father (later Cardinal) Guglielmo Massaia, who had been an adviser to Tewodros, Yohannes and ...”

“... seen the horrors of the evictions after the Famine. When he became an MP, he was dismayed by how little interest his fellow MPs took in the sufferings and struggles of the Indian people. He was soon known as ‘the Member for India’. But his compassion didn’t temper his critique of Christianity. In the first issue of his first periodical, the short-lived ...”

“... written for defendants in the courts. Several of these, including the once celebrated but now little read ‘On the Crown’, deal directly with Demosthenes’ own political career, while surviving speeches by other, rival politicians – one recently recovered from a palimpsest thanks to digital imaging techniques – analyse his career from an ...”

“... adventures that originally belonged to a separate branch of chivalric literature, the tales of Arthur and his Round Table. In the late 15th century this familiar material was handled with sophisticated wit by Luigi Pulci in Medici Florence and Matteo Maria Boiardo in Este Ferrara. Boiardo left his poem Orlando Innamorato unfinished at his death in ...”

“... John Wayne played a godlike rancher, was Hollywood’s first serious Billy the Kid movie since Arthur Penn’s 1956 adaptation of Gore Vidal’s Left-Handed Gun. Although much concerned with issues of law and order, it is not quite an establishment Western. In it, Billy is (initially) among the good guys and, for a while, Wayne’s protégé. The villains ...”

“... was driven to wish, in the course of the 1895 election, that ‘the working classes would pay a little more attention to the history of the growth of this Empire. I wish they would think more of the questions connected with its further expansion.’ It would be interesting to see a detailed calculation of the proportion of the British population directly or ...”

“... Air Force, and despite the help the Red Army could provide by driving simultaneously south to Port Arthur, the casualties on the beaches of Kyushu and Honshu alone were expected to be staggering: advance estimates numbered tens of thousands dead on the first day. Pushing on from those bridgeheads in the bitterly cold weather, the Allied Armies would come face ...”