“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... had been given to Nancy and her husband Waldorf as a wedding present by his father, William Waldorf Astor, who had called it ‘the most magnificent wedding gift ever made, I should imagine’: a Palladian mansion in 375 acres on the banks of the Thames. Waldorf and Nancy hosted epic house parties there, welcoming, among others, Shaw, Amy ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... when I was about five. There were a few blissful memories of being scared out of my wits by William Hartnell in Dr Who, then nothing but The Archers, Round the Horne and Just a Minute for the next decade. By contrast, my wife grew up in a household where radio was virtually unknown while the television was switched on in the morning and remained that ...”

“... of the Other Woman’). When the New Yorker writer Lillian Ross embarked on a relationship with William Shawn, the magazine’s married editor, she couldn’t even bear to call it ‘having an affair’, never mind ‘mistressdom’. In Ross’s view, a mistress was ‘a heavily mascaraed woman in a corny movie, wearing a negligee and sitting around sulking ...”

“... Christians, ‘Mahometans’ and ‘idolaters’. Idolatry eventually included everyone in the non-white world from Aztecs to Taoists, even, during the Crusades, the Mahometans, regardless of their strict prohibitions against graphic representations of God or of the Prophet. (In The Song of Roland they are seen praying to a menagerie of idols, including Apollo ...”