“... a work that Douglas does not mention. Miniature intellectual biographies in the ‘Modern Masters’ style are, at their best, a kind of dialogue between the biographer and the imagined author of a corpus of textual material which the biographer puts under review. Clearly, in work of this scale, the biographer cannot be expected to take account of all ...”

“... though it was not until 1965 that Kawai publicly called it ‘pre-cultural’ behaviour. In 1992, William McGrew summarised chimpanzee tool differences in different regions. West African chimps crack nuts using stones as hammers, and other stones or tree-roots as anvils. East African chimps do not. The same nut-tree species grow in East Africa, there are ...”

“... or other recent trends, and can be quite contemptuous of all of them. The 20th-century masters he praises most highly are Picasso and Léger – both Communist Party members. Léger, in particular, is a ‘heroic’ artist, who ‘rejected every implication of “Glamour”’. Eventually, however, Berger appears to have become disenchanted with ...”

“... a scientist’s school’ (in 1905 there were eight times as many classics as science masters) – on a scholarship, then studied mathematics at Oxford, switching to Greats after his first year. He attended the zoology lectures given there by E.S. Goodrich, who was (like M.D. Hill, one of his science masters at ...”

“... documentary sources,’ he writes, ‘include the hitherto unpublished expedition journals of William Grant Stairs and memoirs of Alice Pike Barney’; he also pays generous tribute to Richard Hall’s earlier biography, ‘a model of hard-nosed and painstaking investigation’. Hall was the first to reveal Stanley’s secret engagement to Alice ...”

“... please), and all who made ‘rather a May game of marriage, than a holy institution of God’. William Gouge, a London minister, was a little more relaxed: in 1622 he allowed ‘all those lawful customs that are used for the setting forth of the outward solemnity thereof, as meeting of friends, accompanying the bridegroom and bride both to and from the ...”

“... been deployed in recent years, and which has been treated, directly or obliquely, in novels like William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice, films like The Night Porter, and in the writings of Hannah Arendt, George Steiner, Bruno Bettelheim and a host of others. But on the subject of the nuclear holocaust there is a deafening silence. It is as if, somehow, the ...”

“... in its motley pungency. The capital’s literati – J.G. Lockhart, John Wilson, Walter Scott, William Maginn, Allan Cunningham, William Blackwood, Francis Jeffrey, Henry Cockburn – are evoked, not as ciphers for their works but as bullish personalities. What Miller values most in Hogg’s fiction – its ‘intentness ...”

“... done for other projected and equally unauthorised lives of Hammett by David Fechheimer and William Godschalk, and upon material gathered by William Nolan, editor of Dashiell Hammett: A Casebook. In other words, Shadow Man emerges from a background of intrigue: prolonged scuffling in the literary undergrowth and a ...”

“... announced in his newspaper column that he had decided to call his Homosexual Law Reform Bill ‘William’. This was partly because it was about ‘boys’, partly because it was his custom in restaurants to ask for ‘William’ instead of the bill, but giving the Bill a pet name also seems to have been an attempt to ...”

“... gave orders to destroy a statue of Mangin in the seventh arrondissement.A performance piece by William Kentridge, The Head and the Load, which premiered at Tate Modern in July, is now showing at the Armory in New York (until 15 December). It tells the story of African porters serving the Great Powers as they fought it out in their respective African ...”

“... however, little mention was made of black people in the London press. Many had run away from their masters to lead anonymous, fugitive lives. Some died of poverty or went to sea; some were transported to America or, more commonly, Australia. Others had moved to different parts of Britain. The custom of giving Africans garish or geo-specific names like ...”

“... this farrago of creaking allegory, mixed metaphor, bathos and ill-judged comic effect, it is William McGonagall. It comes almost as a relief, therefore, to return to the cliché-ridden chat of the bloke at the bar: ‘like the proverbial dog with a bone’; ‘Woe betide you’; ‘I made a reasonable fist of sounding angry’; ‘All this is happening ...”

“... the Art Students League of New York in the 1950s. Dickinson had been a pupil of both Hawthorne and William Merritt Chase, who introduced the concept of the premier coup to American art schools. Unlike a sketch, a premier coup is intended as a work of art in its own right. Executed in a single sitting, it may share the unfinished properties of a preparatory ...”

“... that Yeats has been to school with Goya, and that a few of the paintings are parasitic upon the masters they acknowledge. The Bar, for instance, doesn’t stand free of its obvious source, Manet’s Un Bar aux Folies Bergères. But to move from one of these paintings to another in a large room is to be convinced of their integrity. Yeats started in a small ...”