“... this farrago of creaking allegory, mixed metaphor, bathos and ill-judged comic effect, it is William McGonagall. It comes almost as a relief, therefore, to return to the cliché-ridden chat of the bloke at the bar: ‘like the proverbial dog with a bone’; ‘Woe betide you’; ‘I made a reasonable fist of sounding angry’; ‘All this is happening ...”

“... Not​ many artists merit an exhibition where none of their work is on display. But for the masters of classical Greece there is little choice: most of their paintings and sculptures have been lost or destroyed and what we know of them comes from the descriptions and copies of later generations. Fidia, at the Capitoline Museums in Rome until 5 May, is the first exhibition dedicated to the Athenian sculptor Phidias, celebrated in his lifetime for the statue of Zeus at Olympia but best known today for his work on the Acropolis ...”

“... almost impossibly subtle variations. (I thought of Rembrandt, Goya, Rothko and other sfumato masters of darkness.) The black background behind the boy on the unicorn in Forty Acres and a Unicorn (2007) – a reference to the unrealised Civil War promise to grant freed families ‘forty acres and a mule’ – is all-consuming. It’s not clear whether ...”

“... phrase – as an ‘emblem of empire to come’. Roe was, however, the diplomatic servant of two masters: he was James’s representative, but received his annual salary of £600 from the EIC, which barred him from involvement in commercial matters. The demand for his appointment had come from company factors in India such as ...”

“... on race, between an extraordinary openness to assimilation and outbursts of unashamed racism? William Nelson’s Enlightenment Biopolitics offers an elegant solution to the puzzle. French revolutionaries held such extreme views, he argues, because the French Enlightenment pioneered scientific racism a century before adepts of Darwin built racist ...”

“... his Collected Poems, has 58; Cat’s Whisker by Philip Gross (three years on) 41; Jouissance by William Scammell (two years) 38; Disbelief by John Ash (three years) 55; Ken Smith’s Wormwood, a collection of poems written during a spell as a writer in residence in Wormwood Scrubs (one year), 30. The justification for such work-rates, beyond the economics ...”

“... 1841, the whaling ship Acushnet, newly built at Fairhaven, Massachusetts, fell in with the whaler William Wirt, of Nantucket, near the Pacific island of Juan Fernández (Alexander Selkirk’s lonely home during the years 1704-9), off the coast of Chile. One of the Acushnet’s fo’c’sle crew was the young Herman Melville. The two ships hove to for a few ...”

“... was met by a near unanimous lack of critical acclaim. The screenplay was based on a novel by John Masters (1914-83), who had served in the British army in India before and during the Second World War. Masters’s family had had a relationship with India stretching back five generations; I have been told by elderly Indian ...”

“... According to Butler, he worried that the 150,000 blacks of the Union army would fight their former masters if denied an equal place in Southern society. Lincoln’s instinct was to ‘export them all to some fertile country with a good climate, which they could have to themselves’. Butler had the perfect plan. Why not send 50,000 black troops to dig a canal ...”

“... worked to free black slaves in England who had been brought back from the Caribbean by their masters. These efforts culminated in the Somerset decision of 1772, a legal circumlocution which may not actually have ended slavery but which persuaded a good many people – planters included – that it had done. During the Revolution itself, the loyal British ...”

“... about the painter Whistler which catches at one’s imagination. It concerns his draughtsmanship. William Rothenstein recalls Whistler talking to him contemptuously of Oscar Wilde’s house in Tite Street and doing him a little drawing of it, to illustrate the monotony of such a terrace house. ‘I noticed then,’ says Rothenstein, ‘how childishly Whistler ...”

“... landscape painters of the generation after his were trained in his London studio, including William Marlow, Joseph Farington and, best of all, Thomas Jones and William Hodges. Unlike Gainsborough, who took off from the tradition of Dutch landscape painting, in Rome Wilson became a follower of the school of Claude ...”

“... at work around him. This creates a much more rounded picture of Lawrence too. The chief ones are William Yale, representative in the Middle East of the disreputable Standard Oil Company of New York (and so of American capitalism); Curt Prüfer, ardent German nationalist, working to seduce the Arabs to the German side, who was later a convert to ‘the ...”

“... His discussion of it, in the chapter on ‘Justice’, is the centrepiece of his book. ‘William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll,’ the song begins, ‘with a cane that he twirled round his diamond ring finger.’ ‘William Zanzinger had 24 years/Owns a tobacco farm of six hundred acres’; Hattie Carroll ...”

“... history, according to current rumours, is to be given a frontal lobotomy. Our present political masters apparently resent the work of professional historians in undermining the Anglocentric tradition on which British self-confidence was bashed for centuries. Basking in the afterglow of a landslide victory and fully aware of the potency of the Falklands ...”