“... or another – and latterly kept African slaves, who she thought were subhuman (‘these nasty black beasts’) and responsive only to the whip. Ellis omits most of this. Maybe she has reasons to distrust Meryon, but if so she doesn’t give them. So far as judging character is concerned, most of Stanhope’s assessments seem to have been coloured by the ...”

“... Last month​ , Michael Gove dispatched Ian Paisley Junior, the Democratic Unionist Party MP for North Antrim, with brutal indifference. Brexit was done, the DUP had been done over, and everyone could see that it was entirely the party’s own fault. On 11 February, Gove spoke from the House of Commons while Paisley Junior sat at his computer in Ballymena ...”

“... the frame, these women also ‘externalise the viewer’, which heightens our sense of autonomy. (Michael Fried would call this ‘absorption’, while Freud might see it as voyeurism.) A related argument can be made about Seurat. In The Models (1886-88), he depicts three nudes in his studio with La Grande Jatte behind them, one on the floor with her back to ...”

“... a little thunderous, but not to the point of Mannerism, nor are his figures as stagey-grotesque as Michael Ayrton’s were. His line and colour are tart – compared with illustrations commissioned for cookery books today, almost brutal – but the world they create is welcoming. Before market research quantified the effectiveness of commercial art, and fine ...”

“... for his own work, and the start of an important – perhaps his most important – friendship. Michael Ramsbotham was also a writer, five years younger than Henry Reed, and from a more privileged background. After Charterhouse, from which he was expelled, he went up to King’s College, Cambridge. At the end of his second year, in June 1940, he was called ...”

“... to find a common religious ground with her, and expecting her to approve of The Adventures of the Black Girl in her Search for God. Still involved in politics, he chucked MacDonald and took up Mosley instead, supposing him to be the sort of strong world-changing type he admired, and a proponent of ‘the only practical alternative to fascism’. He continued ...”

“... just behave with politeness – for the rest – she’s had it.’ In his biography of Williams, Michael Freedland gives a fuller account of this incident. He explains the basis of the sketch – two spies complaining about the uselessness of their technical gadgetry – and quotes Fenella Fielding: ‘We both had death pills. I would die first leaving him ...”

“... full of Samoyeds, radiantly white dog-shaped clouds travelling up to the fourth floor in silence, black noses twitching in the dead air.If you watch Crufts on TV, as 8.5 million people do every year, you will see some pretty unusual things. Turn on Channel 4 during the International Freestyle, and you will find a Slovakian woman and a Border collie doing a ...”

“... bones might be deep in Forest Lawn, but the audience expects and will pay for his presence. Michael Jackson Live? It’s a no-brainer, securing the singer a kind of higher existence – a freedom from quibbling reality – that the real Jackson tried to have all his life but could only dream of in a terrifying series of Neverlands.Dead 2Pac appeared at ...”

“... tension; the stakes are life and death. The best physician-novelists – Arthur Conan Doyle, Michael Crichton (who was also the creator of the show ER) – deploy technical language and scientific reasoning to produce an effect of dazzling competence. For the lay reader, the presence of a scientific authority figure is soothing, the revelation of ...”

“... Hirschbein’s Miriam and Mendele’s Valley of Tears. The persistent tales of auction blocks – black slave style – in restaurants at ports of arrival may or may not be well-founded, but ‘it seems likely that something like nine thousand Jewish women came to practise prostitution in Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay during the quarter-century ...”

“... should not be allowed to put one off reading it. All the economic reasons for not producing black and white pocket catalogues are obvious, and I own and pore over illustrated art books. But I am also sure that paintings sometimes need to be defended from apparatus which seems to celebrate them, but really confuses the relationship which matters most ...”

“... within the 16,900,000 population of Spanish America. On the other hand, as reported in Michael Zuckerman’s splendid essay ‘Identity in British America’, the journey across the Atlantic was hellish, quite unlike (in the right monsoon) the trip from the Hadramaut to Zanzibar, or from Canton to Johor. As late as the 18th century, Eliza Pinckney ...”

“... and Jewish; a celibate sensualist, a congenital iconoclast and a National Liberal. He dined off black plates and dreamed of Disraeli. His friends thought that he needed a wife or a God, or possibly both. In middle life he acquired one of the former, and continued to seek the latter on periodic retreats.’ To most right-thinking regular officers such a man ...”

“... of his prolific (hetero)sexual adventures: he had, says a more up-to-date historian than Rowse, Michael MacDonald, ‘a mesmerising personality and the sexual appetite of a goat’, and studded his diary with his ‘haleking’, as he put it, with an A to Z of his women, and with planning or avoiding such occasions as his consultation of the stars ...”