“... could not – that Pietro had not forgotten their modest climb and survey a few years earlier. Henry Wotton, James I’s ambassador to Venice, bought Bernardo’s copies of Alberti’s works on painting and architecture, and brought them back to England, seeing them as key texts for the transformation of English ...”

“... The Wiki authors seem here to be thinking of, among others, Henry Darger, the obsessive, reclusive, quasi-paedophilic Chicago hospital janitor and bona fide outsider-genius, who died in 1973, leaving behind hundreds of extraordinary scrolls of artwork, exquisitely painted and collaged, depicting an apocalyptic ...”

“... the military (he became a pacifist), the aristocracy (he followed the American writer Henry George in believing in common ownership of land) and the Orthodox Church (which excommunicated him) – increased his stature in revolutionary times, as did the government’s hostility towards him and the fact that he was sufficiently engaged in reality to ...”

“... This, too, ranks high among poems of the war. On its own it would be enough to class Johnston with Henry Reed, Bernard Spencer, F.T. Prince and Norman Cameron. It is a high-quality example of what can by now be seen to be a particular school of Virgilian plangency, the poetry of the broken-hearted fields. But it is probably not one of Johnston’s best ...”

“... to register the world around him. His friend John le Gay Brereton could see the importance of Henry Lawson. Brennan couldn’t. He had no interest in the bush, the Labour movement or Australian nationalism. In the Australian Nineties, a period which self-consciously but justifiably felt itself to be alive with the possibility of a new national ...”

“... Soane was born in 1753, the son of a Berkshire bricklayer. At 15 he met a London architect, James Peacock, who was closely associated with George Dance, architect to the City of London. Dance gave Soane a place in his household. After three or four years he left Dance for Henry Holland, from whom he learned more of ...”

“... business as a popular novelist with grotesquely inappropriate equipment (Flaubert, Maupassant, James) and never really mastered the themes and the manner of popular romance. Above all, he chose to write English, which was not even his second language. Of course all these choices contributed to Conrad’s eventual triumph, though the last and possibly the ...”

“... wilderness.It was not necessary to be an aristocrat to enter this game. Hembry introduces us to Dr Henry Jephson, whose ‘professional income was said to be £20,000, the largest in the world’. He not only brought fame to Leamington’s waters, but toiled mightily in banking, railways, gas, beer, insurance and farming; when his health failed at fifty he ...”

“... pocket-slim volumes of the Buildings of England, take years to complete each hefty replacement. James Bettley, responsible for the new Essex volume, did not even have to bother with Ilford, Romford, Leyton and Walthamstow. With the setting up of the GLC and the new administrative boundaries of 1965, Essex, as the blurb to the Shell Guide quaintly puts ...”

“... and momentous events is a familiar move in Boyd’s fiction. In The New Confessions (1987), John James Todd, a Scottish filmmaker, fights in the trenches, is pauperised by the Wall Street crash, witnesses the rise of Nazism in Berlin (where he attends parties with Fritz Lang and Thomas Mann), and arrives in Hollywood just in time to fall foul of ...”

“... also alleged that Corbyn had been ‘a paid informant’ and flattered Sarkocy as ‘a communist James Bond’. Inevitably, the Tories were by now enthusiastically clambering onto the bandwagon. First out of the traps was the brash young defence secretary, Gavin Williamson. The Sun’s report, he said, shows why Corbyn cannot be trusted: ‘Time and time ...”

“... to lay down petroleum deposits – ‘on whose behalf,’ Calvino adds, ‘we do not know.’ James Joyce began his career as a social historian of ‘scrupulous meanness’, and ended up with Finnegans Wake, which is both an avatar of the Arabian Nights and a vast, impossibly prolix history of the world. Calvino, too, broadens out, his later work ...”

“... anarchists declared their support for Sinclair. Some screenwriters and an occasional actor (James Cagney, Katharine Hepburn) defied their studios and supported Sinclair; Rogers managed to conduct a running commentary on the campaign without ever taking sides. Will Rogers was the friend of the New York immigrant Jewish blackface comedian Eddie Cantor (he ...”

“... poetic sequence Modern Love, when she traumatised Meredith by leaving him for their artist friend Henry Wallis). Jane died in 1851, and Peacock’s record as a widower confirms the sense of desperation. The following year – emboldened at this point in his career by financial security – he proposed marriage to Claire Clairmont’s niece, a 27-year-old ...”

“... in the trenches during the First World War are familiar, but Rose has found a Glasgow woodcarver, James Murray, who responded to the horrors around him by carrying a different volume of poetry in his kitbag – Goethe, in the original. Reading could be uncontrollable in other ways. Female readers read books for boys without adopting ...”