“... Beatles, who were once said to be bigger than Jesus. What explains Jackson’s journey from cute little black boy with immense talent and optimism to a mutilated gender fiasco who busies himself impersonating Elizabeth Taylor in Butterfield 8? Jackson is a protean idea of a person, rather confused, rather desperate, but complete in his devotion to ...”

“... invention of painting in antiquity (a motif Goya may have derived from the Scottish artist David Allan, one of whose paintings was on board the frigate The Westmoreland when it was captured by French warships in 1779, its contents dispersed in Spain).In 1786, Carlos III appointed Goya a court painter. The opportunities at court, however, were limited in ...”

“... has stuck firmly in the work of popular novelists from Rosemary Sutcliff to Bernard Cornwell and Allan Massie, and (in this case with strident claims to historical accuracy) in movies like Antoine Fuqua’s King Arthur (2004). Fleming ignores the phenomenon, and the scenario. It isn’t the only piece of historical tradition she rejects. Right at the start ...”

“... precious 18th-century automaton in excellent working order: a metre-high machine featuring a cute little quill clasped by a miniature silver hand. When you wind it up, it spends four laborious minutes writing out a Latin formula petitioning God for leisure and material prosperity, which seems a pertinent request under the circumstances. Getty’s star exhibit ...”

“... which introduces us to an older England, from Burton to Kipling; ‘The Americans’, from Edgar Allan Poe to Truman Capote, a culture as far from us in space as is the older England in time; ‘My Contemporaries’, from Ivy Compton-Burnett to V.S. Naipaul, where the richest, funniest and saddest anecdotes are to be found; and a short fourth ...”

“... among immigrants themselves. The number of feminists teaching in the various disciplines also does little to help the case for patriotism, for, not only has patriotism been associated with male chauvinism, it also seems to depend on local, geographical identities, whereas the cause of women generally looks to universal standards of equality and justice. Among ...”

“... out yet what they were all laughing about after you left the bridge club?’ ‘Even in a charming little town like this one, there was still so much evil in people,’ she thinks as she mails another letter. Franklin compares Jackson to Nathaniel Hawthorne, but the setting of the stories just as often recalls Thornton Wilder – if his plays continued after ...”

“... Daniell wrote a pamphlet on The New Trade Unionism with a handsome Scottish radical called Robert Allan Nicol (a ‘Shelleyan type’), which, rather than discussing pickets, looked forward to ‘the union of the Souls of Mankind in a perfect Love’. Daniell had met Nicol when she was still married, during a trip to Edinburgh for medical treatment in ...”

“... bakings and child-mindings is enough to make one sympathise with Coleridge, who when staying at Allan Bank never got up in the morning, ate his dinner in silence and immediately retired again to his room. The comradeship of Nether Stowey days had evaporated, leaving the usual exploitation of enthusiastic women by preoccupied and self-protective men. The ...”

“... poem’s middle stanza, in italics: Me master years a hundred since from my parents sunder’d, A little child, they caught me as the savage beast is caught, Then hither me across the sea the cruel slaver brought. These lines are a reminder of the extraordinary delicacy and compassion with which Whitman described the pursuit and capture of a ‘hounded ...”

“... written about so often by Vidal’s guests and interviewers, and by Vidal himself, that there is little to say that hasn’t been said. It is a beautiful place, if you like houses perched on cliffs, with an epic view of the Tyrrhenian Sea (somewhere in the hazy distance south of Salerno are the remains of the Greek settlement at Paestum). If you don’t like ...”

“... and culture. The potential value of genetic insights into the past became clear in 1987 when Allan Wilson and his colleagues at Berkeley sampled mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) – a mere 0.0005 per cent of the genome, inherited solely along the maternal line – from living populations and analysed it to show that Homo sapiens, rather than having a ...”

“... other people’s. She’s interested in getting this particular story right. Her prose is full of little assurances, checks, correctives and adjustments, as though to establish things once and for all, to settle the matter. ‘That’s right’; ‘it was actually’; ‘couldn’t we’; ‘didn’t we’; ‘yes we did.’ Everything is pinned ...”

“... biography to date, by Patrick McGilligan, includes plenty of anecdotes about fear, but supplies little by way of evidence of its ultimate cause, and draws no conclusions. Peter Ackroyd, however, is firmly of the Truffaut school. His Hitchcock trembles from the outset: ‘Fear fell upon him in early life.’ At the age of four (or 11, or …), his father had ...”

“... turnover of workers at Fordlandia was many times higher than in Dearborn. With a fishing line, a little plot of manioc, a pig, a rifle and a bit of foraging, anyone could subsist. The cash to buy the kerosene, matches, machetes, cloth, salt and gunpowder needed to make good this independence could be earned by brief spells of wage labour. Like the ...”