“... an author figure listening, in this case Barker herself. But the devices serve opposite ends. Charles, the main character in I Am Sovereign, who is trying to sell a cottage inherited from his mother, wants to ‘calmly and systematically re-pattern’ the way he thinks – to silence his ‘Toxic Inner Critic’ and become more assertive. Cusk adopted a ...”

“... for acrylic and metallic surfaces, for keeping the ‘paint as good as it was in the can’, in Frank Stella’s phrase? Or to the trenchant insistence on primary red, blue and yellow in the interwar Modernisms of Mondrian and the Bauhaus? The usual consensus is to place colour’s prime in the forty years from 1880, the era when chemistry’s heftiest ...”

“... and Upton Sinclair is running as a socialist for governor of California against the Republican Frank Merriam. Merriam is strongly supported by certain sections of Hollywood, led by Louis B. Mayer, head of MGM. Mank, of course, is an old-fashioned leftie – really old-fashioned, the kind that didn’t turn to Stalin. He explains to MGM’s Irving Thalberg ...”

“... regal expansiveness of Paris if the Whitehall Palace that Inigo Jones and John Webb drew up for Charles I had been built. Then our prime minister might be living not in the modest decency of Downing Street but in something more like the Hôtel Matignon. Passing it and other grand houses given over to government use in the rue de Varenne you are struck by ...”

“... and blamed their failures on the dead weight of resistance at all levels of society. John Cook, Charles I’s prosecutor, said that ‘we would have enfranchised the people, if the nation had not more delighted in servitude than in freedom.’ William Sedgwick told the generals that ‘not one of a hundred will own what you set down as the public interest ...”

“... Charles Rosen’s new book is about the group of composers who succeeded the great Viennese Classicists Mozart, Beethoven and Haydn, and the aesthetic movement they represented. The Post-Classicists emerged for the most part during the period from the death of Beethoven (1827) to the death of Chopin (1849). A substantially expanded version of the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures given at Harvard during 1980-1, The Romantic Generation, which follows in the path of its distinguished predecessor The Classical Style, is a remarkable amalgam of precise, brilliantly illuminating analysis, audacious generalisation, and not always satisfying – but always interesting – synthesis scattered over more than seven hundred pages of serviceable but occasionally patronising prose that takes Rosen through a generous amount of mainly instrumental and vocal music at very close range indeed ...”

“... the next one after that. And if the present queen had decided to call it a day at 70, then King Charles III and his mistress would by now already be installed in Buckingham Palace. It is impossible to know whether the British monarchy would have survived developments such as these. But it probably would have done: few sovereigns in modern history have lost ...”

“... sold itself as a think tank pamphlet. Two of those hired to fill senior editorial positions, Charles Leadbeater and Martin Jacques, were ex-Communists who had wound up their party and formed Demos, a research centre aligned to Tony Blair’s New Labour project. Geoff Mulgan, a former Trotskyist and director of Demos, became a contributor to the paper’s ...”

“... he could compromise a steam-engine.’ (The condescension went both ways.) Now Oscar wrote to Frank Harris from the spare bedroom in Oakley Street: ‘Willie makes such a merit of giving me shelter. He means well, I suppose, but it is all dreadful.’ He lasted a week before he fled to the house of his friend Ada Leverson. There he was free from ...”

“... assassination. A more plausible cinematic influence on him is Suddenly (1954), in which Frank Sinatra plays a President’s assassin who acquired his taste for killing in the Second World War. Yet the idea was there in The Manchurian Candidate: an emotionally unstable man returns from a mysterious stay in a Communist country to shoot the ...”

“... and a wealth of pointed references. An Evening of Long Goodbyes, which follows the misfortunes of Charles Hythloday, a posh young layabout, draws on Yeats’s vision of an aristocratic utopia. In Skippy Dies, which takes place at the private Seabrook College, the beleaguered history teacher, Howard, reads Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That and becomes ...”

“... technological development essential to the rise of tennis was the discovery of vulcanisation by Charles Goodyear in 1844, which allowed for the production of bouncier balls than the hair-filled ones used in real tennis. ‘When a cut lawn and a soft rubber ball were eventually put together,’ Berry writes, ‘lawn tennis became inevitable and, because it ...”

“... that in cooler moments Jonson complained that ‘Shakespeare wanted Art’ and Milton berated Charles I for preferring the Bard to more serious reading. Wonder, after all, is a feeling which, according to the most authoritative doctrine on the subject available in Shakespeare’s time, you are supposed to get over. As James Biester breezily puts ...”

“... identified with a branch of literature which was hardly his first choice, but such is publishing. Charles Boon, a brewery worker’s son who left school at 12 (‘the original wide boy’, according to his daughter Dinah) was the go-getter who eventually concentrated on light romantic fiction. He did not lack rivals. The Northcliffe fiction factories were ...”

“... one by Franz Kline, the other by Willem de Kooning (they accompany poems written on the plates by Frank O’Hara and Harold Rosenberg respectively), a medium that makes delicate scratching and hatching possible is turned over to coarse brush strokes and crabbed handwriting. Yet both these plates and Lewis’s derive part of their force from a characteristic ...”