“... Barney, which Wheatcroft doesn’t mention, occurred in his heyday. He bought a Millais called Joseph and the Sheep which he hung with due prominence in his Park Lane house. At a reception Barney was loudly asked by an aristocratic society grande dame (presumably to effect some social discomfiture) why he had bought the picture and what was it that made it ...”

“... likely to have derived his eclectic borrowings? No single source can be cited with confidence: as Frank Manuel showed years ago (The 18th Century confronts the Gods, 1959), comparative mythology had been advancing for more than one hundred years. Jacob Bryant’s A New System; or, An Analysis of Ancient Mythology (1775) was mentioned once by Blake, and he ...”

“... that they might. A man calling himself David, son of Solomon, claimed that he was the brother of Joseph, a Jewish king who ruled in the Arabian desert over three hundred thousand men – or two and a half of the lost tribes. One of these was the tribe of Reuben, hence the name Reubeni. The man had skin so dark one witness compared him to a ‘Kushite’, or ...”

“... after their marriage, during the darkest period of his mourning. The volume includes letters to Joseph Priestley, Thomas Lawrence, John Thelwall, Samuel Parr (‘the Whig Dr Johnson’), the great liberal advocate Thomas Erskine, R.B. Sheridan, Charles James Fox, the novelists and dramatists Elizabeth Inchbald, Thomas Holcroft, Amelia Alderson, Mary Hays ...”

“... that are wall-to-wall English-language originals. Chatto – home of Chekhov, Proust and Joseph Roth – recently went through three or four seasons without any translations at all. Obviously, publishing isn’t what it was, the bottom line has risen inexorably, there were all the huge and much-bruited takeovers and mergers and acquisitions, but ...”

“... from society in order to indulge his fantasies. Herbert Bradman in Ulverton is self-absorbed; Joseph Monrow in Nineteen Twenty-One is a more attractive character but doesn’t end up writing much. In Thorpe’s account, a writer must withdraw from society, but he pays a price for closeting himself away. Thorpe uses a phrase by Charles Laughton as the ...”

“... Society, founded in emulation of the English Dialect Society which had sponsored the work of Joseph Wright. The English neglect their heroic scholars, and I find I have to tell people about the six word-hoarding tomes of Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary, now seemingly derelict and unvisited by all but the occasional distressed PhD student. I do not ...”

“... the appropriate Galenic text. That tradition – or much of it – has been revived in books by Frank Gonzalez-Crussi, a professor of pathology in the Children’s Memorial Hospital at Northwestern University, who has created a subgenre of his own: portrayals of the usual and the monstrous drawn from his own professional life, with a bookish veneer that ...”

“... than fifty years. It was engineered by several extraordinarily persuasive dealers, most notably Joseph Duveen, who ensured that some of the richest men in the US – Henry Clay Frick, Henry Huntington, Joseph Widener and Andrew Mellon among them – employed only two types of contemporary artist (often recommended by ...”

“... have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved.’ Jacob dies happy that he has seen his son Joseph’s face, and Moses, of course, spoke to God ‘face to face, as a man speaketh unto his friend’. The Book of Numbers contains the little prayer so beloved of the Christian liturgy: ‘The Lord bless thee, and keep thee: The Lord make his face shine upon ...”

“... the visitor. Lockwood petitions meekly for a cup of tea. Then things start to move quickly. Joseph, the servant, conducts him to an upstairs room, where he’s soon fast asleep, primed for nightmare. We never do find out what happened to the cup of tea. Before long, Heathcliff, shaken out of an uneasy rest by Lockwood’s terror, has attempted to hurl ...”

“... or a kinder, gentler James Wood? In ‘Two Paths for the Novel’, she looked at books by Joseph O’Neill and Tom McCarthy. Realism, it seemed, was on the run, and it turned out that novels in English could still be vehicles for avant-garde ideas. Why not try to be James Joyce? A bit wobbly and lopsided by design, NW is a hotchpotch in five ...”

“... Myrna Loy and Ike to enjoy watching shoot-’em-ups; underdog Harry Truman had been inspired by Frank Capra’s 1948 State of the Union and, as the son of a sometime Hollywood mogul, Kennedy was groomed for glamorous stardom. But no American president before Nixon had ever made a public pronouncement based on his experience of a movie, and, Ronald ...”

“... of housekeeping: she had had to come to terms with another family problem, a wastrel brother Frank who gambled heavily and gave away family jewels to his women. This last was a heinous offence in the eyes of Princess May, who in later life was able to recover unauthorised gifts from various quarters. As a great lover of jewels, she must have been ...”

“... of Intelligence of the British Fascists, to head its counter-subversion unit, and in 1927 sent Joseph Ball, who had been conducting black propaganda against the Labour Party, to become Director of Publicity at Conservative Central Office. A secret service diaspora was thus created whose influence is still being felt. Chronology alone is not sufficient to ...”