“... on the video, sniggered at the parodies – nobody has heard of, or cares about, Spring of the Lamb by Douglas Woolf. Sorry? Doesn’t ring a bell. One of the rarest, most delicately obtuse talents lost by America: a skeletal revenant too canny to leave any footprints in the dust. (‘He’s come down from Kellogg or Wallace – Idaho camptowns, feathery ...”

“... them with my fellow men.Mostly, however, he compels our attention as an eloquent villain who, like Richard III, surpasses our expectations in the extravagance of his misdeeds and has the wit to mock himself as he does so. Maldoror claims to be as bad as bad can be. He equates himself with the female shark which, after a shipwreck whose possible survivors he ...”

“... So the baby was put up for adoption, and Angela became Deborah, with parents called Cathy and Richard Harry, also known as Caggie and Dick. Caggie’s family had once owned a bank in Ridgewood, New Jersey; Dick worked as a salesman for Alkan Silk Woven Labels in Paterson. A sister, Martha, arrived six years later. ‘My little accidental family’ gets ...”

“... and readiness to help. But Gamlin lived his double life in the country that existed before Cliff Richard. On the back of his broadcasting fame, and his other interests, he became a spokesman on the tribulations of the Ovalteens. At the Albert Hall in 1949, he followed the Duke of Edinburgh and Clement Attlee in speaking at the Daily Mail Youth Forum – an ...”

“... rigour; but it lies discreetly behind a non-academic joyfulness. The French used to celebrate Richard Cobb as le grand Cobb; and perhaps it isn’t too early to hail his successor as le grand Robb. Of Robb’s 19 chapters, three are set in the late 18th century, six in the 19th, eight in the 20th and two in the 21st. They feature many of the best-known ...”

“... of the non-combatant Lawrence to complain while thousands of his compatriots fell in France. But Richard Aldington felt that Lawrence never recovered from the banning of The Rainbow, and Kinkead-Weekes follows him by placing this event at the centre of his narrative. The judge ruled that there was ‘no justification whatever for the perpetration of such a ...”

“... next week (when I have to go into hospital) when deep in the water comes the spectral body of a lamb. Though tagged, it’s not long born, and must have slipped into the beck in its first days of life. I suppose we must try and keep that in mind, too, as pale and ghost-like, it is swept out now into the flooded meadows. 14 April. Regular check-ups for ...”

“... Twomblys, accidental Jackson Pollocks, accidental works by Eva Hesse or Louise Bourgeois or Richard Tuttle or Jean-Michel Basquiat. (See recent coup to the right: an accidental Philip Guston. Guston’s 1968 painting Boot is above, and below a CE artist’s picture, now in my collection, of an eight-fingered glove.) At such moments, you not only feel ...”

“... from constituencies with a wide franchise), the machinations of the government were widely known. Richard Carlile, the editor of the Republican, concluded that ‘the ministers have been playing with Thistlewood … they brought the Cato-street affair to maturity, just to answer their purposes for striking terror into the minds of the people on the eve of a ...”

“... Vinal, already the mother of one illegitimate child, swore that the father of her next was one Richard Parkes, ‘husbandman of the parish of Ringmer’. On 25 October Turner set off at 2 a.m. for Ringmer, accompanied by two colleagues from East Hoathly, one of whom, a prosperous farmer called Jeremiah French, was known to Turner as a scourge of paupers ...”

“... pate concealed beneath a loin of mutton is actually the head of a delicious (and far from Paschal) lamb. Seventeenth-century London never seems far away even in the nominally Italianate world of a tragedy like Women, Beware Women: when the unimaginative young factor Leantio, struggling to suppress his desires with the prudent aphorisms of the warehouse, sees ...”

“... is), besides various ceremonial cleavers including the one used to cut up the first New Zealand lamb brought to England and served to Queen Victoria in 1880. Nicest though are two Victorian or Edwardian toy butchers’ shops. They’re bigger and grander than the one Dad made for Gordon and me c.1940 but whereas these joints are nailed into place, Dad’s ...”

“... The Thames underwrites a narrative of royal escapes, murdered princelings, futile rebellion. Richard II is rowed downstream to confront Wat Tyler and his peasant army. Unable to call on anything as formidable as the Metropolitan Police’s Territorial Support Group, the boy king refuses to step ashore. ‘Rough, rude men’ had been sent ‘all over the ...”

“... down the trumpet ‘just like you’re spitting paper pellets at the school bully’. One morning, Richard Lloyd, the cathedral organist, a man who like my father never got angry, auditioned me at his grand piano and offered me a place in the cathedral choir. I was ten years old. Despite the name, most of the boys at the Chorister School weren’t ...”

“... Palgrave in Suffolk. She was a celebrity – Wedgwood produced a cameo of her, and she appeared in Richard Samuel’s painting The Nine Living Muses of Great Britain at the Royal Academy in 1779 – but involved herself in the obscure business of schooling with characteristic energy and intelligence: she liked the boys and did not sentimentalise them, and she ...”