“... from his acceptance as genuine of absurd photographs faked by two enterprising small girls, Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths. This final phase of eccentricity and sheer gullibility had succeeded upon a long lifetime’s interest in spiritualism and psychical research. In his later twenties Doyle was beginning to organise séances, and the first of these to ...”

“... to Mr Major. But this is not to deny the two meanings. When I watched him paying tribute to Billy Wright on an ITV programme, evoking (as, according to Richard Holt and Alan Tomlinson in their essay, he often does) the lost world of a handful of heroes – Wright himself, Nat ...”

“... wore the same clothes is to deny the realities of a society structured around class.’ Philip Wright proposes that special reception areas should be attached to museums, where the categories of objects the museum contains (‘white man’s art’ and so on), the ‘jobs and personalities’ of their donors and the curricula vitae of the staff will be ...”

“... the ideal virtuoso and Grand Tourist. He was first drawn to the subject by the Roman landscapes of Richard Wilson; published a book on Wilson’s then little-known drawings; and went on to annotate the letters written from Rome in 1757 by a minor British painter who had mentioned Wilson and other British travellers and expatriates in the city. This led him to ...”

“... of the spectrum: his heroes are Copley, Cole and Church; St Gaudens, Eakins and Homer; Frank Lloyd Wright and Edward Hopper. When it comes to abstract art, his likings tend to be predictable: nobody could be considered a maverick nowadays for admiring Jackson Pollock or David Smith, and Hughes’s heart clearly belongs to the least challenging, most ...”

“... sustainability in general. But ideals can rapidly switch around. When, in the 1930s, Frank Lloyd Wright explored the possibilities of the extended city in his Broadacre City scheme, he saw the automobile as the saviour of the common man, the route to a democratic utopia. Now, for the good of our health and the planet, we are being asked to abandon our cars ...”

“... career (in his chapter on Marvell, Milton and Dryden) without reference to Lawrence Lipking or Richard Helgerson. The Forster-Dickens chapter makes no mention of the alternative line of Dickens biography that descends through Thomas Wright and Katherine Longley to our contemporaries Peter Ackroyd and Claire Tomalin. In ...”

“... academic philosophers who have bewitched themselves into a sense of a civilising mission. For Richard Rorty, philosophers’ obsession with such merely mood-enhancing words as Reason, Reality, Truth, Objectivity and Method is little more than the fetishism of an increasingly parochial discipline. If you really want to understand how knowledge is made and ...”

“... but the family lived in a modernist house designed by an uncle who had studied with Frank Lloyd Wright. Russell was named for his father, with whom he seems to have had a fractious but intensely close relationship; an ex-girlfriend remembers being surprised that even in his early twenties Russell still routinely referred to Charles Sr as ...”

“... and highly perceptive, it’s the first book for a long time that I’ve wanted to put beside Richard Usborne’s Clubland Heroes. The Nine Literary Studies of Dorothy Sayers are, in fact, less literary than biographical and bibliographical. They detect mysteries about things like publication date or the pseudonymous works of her husband. There are a lot ...”

“... paper, typeface devised God knows when by fuck knows who, blurbs by the well-respected likes of Richard Howard, Carolyn Forché and Franz Wright – is enough to cure one of the idiocy of reading poetry in translation. Because: why shouldn’t they all be like that? It seems harder to gain admission to a children’s ...”

“... beliefs and conservative temperament, and religious and secular, as a congregant of Rev. Jeremiah Wright and a product of Harvard Law School. It wasn’t simply that he had experienced the variety of American life: he embodied it, so that his becoming president would be an act of healing, for the country and for himself. It is striking how often he runs these ...”

“... autobiographical papers, Surely you’re joking, Mr Feynman?, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Richard Feynman, describes being piqued by an article in Science about how well bloodhounds can smell. Feynman hates not being best, and so he took time off from inventing the atom bomb (he was working at Los Alamos) to run an experiment. He had his wife handle ...”

“... and, interpreting ‘poets’ generously, Constable, Thoreau, Conrad, Calvino and Frank Lloyd Wright, whose Fallingwater is Harrison’s model house, built on the Ruskinian principle of ‘not only coming to rest in its environment but also embodying an extension of the foundation upon which it rests’. Harrison’s book begins with a quotation from The ...”

“... hanging out with real white trash like P.K. Van der Byl, Smith’s kinkily sadistic deputy, and Richard Cecil, the brave but dim-bulbed scion of the Salisburys. We met in Meikles bar and had a very frank chat, in the course of which Worsthorne said that while he could easily look on, say, Asians, as equals, he found it very tough to extend the same ...”