“... After the stunning casualties at Antietam, Gladstone and the foreign secretary, Lord John Russell, agreed that a humanitarian crisis was at hand in America; Gladstone feared one in Lancashire as well, among the cotton mill workers. He called for an end to the war through arbitration, declaring that the Confederates ‘have made a nation’. Charles ...”

“... Yeats did indeed wish to be buried in his native soil, but he had witnessed the funeral of George Russell, the poet Æ, in 1935, and been appalled by the level of pomp. Five months before he died he had written to Dorothy Wellesley: ‘I write my poems for the Irish people but I am damned if I will have them at my funeral. A Dublin funeral is something ...”

“... have thought, is the look he is aiming for. 13 March. The last of the History Boys to be cast is Russell Tovey, who is in the NT company and who took part in the first reading of the play. He reads Rudge, the athletic and supposedly stupid boy, effortlessly, but isn’t sure it’s what he really wants to do, having set his sights on playing the more ...”

“... contribute to a feature on Englishness, the other contributors, the letter says, ‘ranging from Frank Bruno to Calvin [sic] MacKenzie’. I wish, as they say. 26 January. The papers are full of the beastliness of Eric Cantona who kicked some loud-mouthed, pop-eyed Crystal Palace supporter and got himself suspended for it ... for ever, some soccer lovers ...”

“... a righteous nation at war is, a fortiori, an argument against empire: ‘No nation has ever made a frank avowal of its real imperial motives. It always claims to be primarily concerned with the peace and prosperity of the people whom it subjugates.’ Nor is any political or economic system exempt from this corruption of the will. Moral Man and Immoral Society ...”

“... nothing but the working over of what is remembered.”’ Ellmann also quotes Joyce’s remark to Frank Budgen: ‘Imagination is memory.’ Budgen, whom Joyce met in Zurich in 1918, records Joyce expressing his aim ‘to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my ...”

“... are also reflections on an earlier self.His writing to Hale coincided with his acquiring a room in Russell Square – ‘and I need not see secretaries or visitors unless I want to.’ A year later he was prompted to recall wrathfully how long it had taken to reach this small ledge of independence: ‘Virginia’s Room of One’s Own irritates me; and I have ...”

“... a Christian after all) but that of the rest of the cast. 7 April. The open mouth of Chelsea’s Frank Lampard, having scored a goal, is also the howl on the face of the damned man in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment. 16 April. The row over Lord Ashcroft’s non-dom status seems to have died down. Nobody, I think, noted that it was the reverse of the row that ...”

“... symbolic figure, perhaps intended to displace a more commonly perceived symbolic figure – Anne Frank, let us say.’ That’s a pretty loaded insinuation. As late as 2005, Ozick, speaking at Harvard, was still condemning Styron’s decision to position a non-Jewish protagonist at the narrative centre, thereby diluting, obscuring and ultimately expunging ...”

“... Robin Hood is a programme of the left. Robin Hood is Jeremy Corbyn. He’s Russell Brand. He’s Hugo Chávez. So it used to seem. But a change has come about. The wealthiest and most powerful in Europe, Australasia and North America have turned the myth to their advantage. In this version of Robin Hood the traditional poor – the ...”

“... Rouault and Modigliani. Bacon’s next ambitious work was called Wound for a Crucifixion. John Russell described it as being ‘set in a hospital ward … On a sculptor’s armature was a large section of human flesh: a specimen wound.’ It didn’t sell, so Bacon took it home and destroyed it, something he would continue to do throughout his life. This ...”

“... and thus further [sic] the world revolution.’ If only people like Bernard Shaw and Bertrand Russell had been so clear-sighted. The failure to secure even a hearing, let alone recognition, from Wilson in Paris did not discourage the Dáil Government from pursuing this issue in the United States itself, where the strongest popular and political support ...”