“... strong anti-Voorstand speech, evoking ‘the sharp-toothed blue-coated Mouse as a paranoid – its white-gloved finger hovering above a button which might destroy the planet’. The first half of the book, then, offers a series of different and constantly surprising takes on the theme of cultural imperialism, the notion of art as a political weapon whether in ...”

“... that matter – spotting conspiracies where others see epidemics: no less a man of the people than William Cobbett was adamant that Asiatic cholera itself was a fiction invented by the powers-that-be to hold the masses in terror. Indeed, as Steve Watkins underlines in his book, the Left in many of its moods has traditionally suspected that the medical ...”

“... figure sitting alarmingly high up on the temple’s architrave: a self-portrait by the artist, William Pars, the designated draughtsman on the Ionian Expedition of 1764-66. In reality Pars was paying as much attention to the charm of the courtyard scene as he was to the antiquities, though not in a way that pleased everyone: as his fellow traveller Richard ...”

“... those new potatoes? Some may think that this is bathos, but the presence within these poems of William Wordsworth (Dorothy and he at one point make a fleeting appearance, grave comic spectres not lightly to be called up for comparison) is a reminder that after the Augustans had derided it there really was discovered to be such a thing as the art of sinking ...”

“... a parcel for you.’ Bond clawed at the parcel with a hand on which he could still see the white outline of the skin-graft he’d had between Casino Royale and Live and Let Die. These physical details from his past made him feel real. ‘Let me,’ sighed the nurse. Basic parcel protocol flashed into his mind. He muttered ‘Bomb’. ‘That’s no ...”

“... Allen Ginsberg’s star now shines more brightly than the rest. True, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs glowed on in the aftermath of On the Road (1957) and Naked Lunch (1959); Brion Gysin, inventor of the cut-up technique, is still visible on a clear night. But the beautiful Lucien Carr, an Alain Delon lookalike drawn into the Beat circle by a ...”

“... As in Sargent’s picture of James at the National Portrait Gallery, he wears a tie around a white winged collar, a similar black jacket and perhaps the same charcoal waistcoat, but he’s not as imposing as he is in that more famous portrait, maybe because the Reform picture is unfinished. There’s a blurred left hand at bottom right: had the artist ...”

“... form of horses. This myth has survived in some unlikely places. John Aubrey ascribed the Uffington White Horse to the brothers, though more recent archaeologists have dated it even earlier, to the Bronze Age. In Lower Saxony, the horse-head gables featured on many farmhouses were still referred to as ‘Hengst und Hors’ as late as 1875.The History of the ...”

“... argument against his taking up French.’ His handwriting ‘was, and remained, unschooled’, William Feaver writes in his new biography, and adds: ‘Having to learn to write with his right hand in a new language and a new script prompted him to feel that such discipline, being foreign to him, was not for him. This became his pattern of behaviour at ...”

“... response to his more portentous gestures, a version of the self-protective rhetorical device that William Empson diagnosed as ‘pseudo-parody to disarm criticism’. ‘I don’t think I am less happy than most. But the word Happy has ceased for years to mean anything I seek to be. How’s that for a pompous mouthful?’ Heartless about his own ...”

“... like Gottlieb and new ones like Marcus Rothkowitz (soon to become Mark Rothko). He came to know William Baziotes and later, through Rothko, Clyfford Still, and then Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell and Ad Reinhardt. According to Motherwell, the group opposed art dedicated either to ‘social values’ or to formalist aesthetics, and they agreed that ...”

“... Sound and the Fury for the sheer pleasure of yet another reading. None of this is to propose that William Faulkner was a non-writer. He was a richly gifted writer and there are times when he writes with real genius. He is keenly observant, and when he so wishes can be stereoscopically graphic. He gives us the intimate feel of an old banker’s run-down bank ...”

“... The  ​ American economist William Nordhaus opened his Nobel Prize speech in 2018 with a slide of the painting El Coloso, traditionally attributed to Goya and completed sometime between 1808 and 1812. Like Goya’s better-known images of the Madrid uprising of 2 May 1808 and the bloody retribution that came after, the painting depicts the calamitous violence of the Peninsular War, which followed Napoleon’s invasion of Spain ...”

“... Club once a week. He saw Harold Wilson every week too, with the other members of the ‘White Commonwealth’, as the handpicked political editors were then called. Yet he did not grow to love or respect these great men. On the contrary, in his book he portrays most of the prime ministers he was intimate with as ...”