“... reviews ‘while they were poring over the latest score from Lords or the Oval’. Later, when William Walton went to see Diaghilev about the possibility of a commission, Lambert went along too and played through his own ballet Adam and Eve, which Diaghilev liked but insisted on retitling Romeo and Juliet, on the grounds that one could hardly ‘expect ...”

“... There was an increasing reliance on court favourites – particularly Bernard Ingham and Charles Powell, the man Campbell describes as the real deputy prime minister. 7. Campbell is interesting on Thatcher’s attitude to local government and here he attempts some psychological history. He makes the point that Thatcher loathed not just Labour, but all local ...”

“... who ‘much later … compelled me to try and draw better’). Thankfully, Burne-Jones also had William Morris, his friend from university. They had chosen the cause of art together, and Morris was to barrel their joint enterprise along for the next forty years or so. Burne-Jones’s earliest works, done in the late 1850s, were in pen-and-ink, one of ...”

“... battles won ‘in bygone days of yore’. Behind Paisley’s head as he spoke was a painting of William of Orange on his white horse at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. One of the key achievements of the Good Friday Agreement was increased alignment between the North and the Republic. In order to avoid the return of a hard border, EU regulatory checks are ...”

“... be juxtaposed. But that was a long time ago, in the England of the 1970s, when, despite Enoch Powell and the National Front, racism seemed a hangover from a defunct imperial and pre-Holocaust past. All we needed to do to eradicate it for ever, we thought, was stage more Rock against Racism events. Shakespeare, who did not occupy a cherished place in the ...”

“... at John Barth and Thomas Pynchon, among others), gave the now unfashionable Somerset Maugham and William Dean Howells their dues, and resurrected the novels of Dawn Powell from neglect. Confronted with reams of words which speak so forthrightly for themselves, Kaplan resorts to academic robot-talk, wading into a minor ...”

“... drop-in shows in ways I could never have predicted. The rarely seen Vulcano, a film directed by William Dieterle in a Hollywood version of Italian neo-realism, achieved a lively, sell-out crowd, many of whom were around my own age and some of whom lived on the barren volcanic island invaded by the original film crew. Folk memories of the Roman diva Anna ...”

“... told the sordid tale of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company, as well as politicians such as William Jennings Bryan, Robert La Follette and even (for a while) Woodrow Wilson, whose New Freedom campaign of 1912 proposed to renew entrepreneurial opportunities through anti-trust and regulatory policies. He recalls a certain kind of populist ...”

“... been ‘unwaveringly rejected by our more powerful pundits of musical taste’ – Hans Keller, William Glock and Peter Heyworth. For someone like Keller, the gatekeeper of the debate about new music in the 1960s and 1970s, Cardew was a godsend: Keller might not agree with what he wrote, but he enjoyed orchestrating the subsequent controversy. Cardew became ...”

“... the greatest man since the Deluge.’ This assessment of Alexander von Humboldt by King Frederick William IV of Prussia, which Andrea Wulf quotes in her fine new biography, may be a slight exaggeration, but it reflects Humboldt’s extraordinary reputation among his contemporaries. On the centennial of his birth, 14 September 1869, elaborate celebrations were ...”

“... suburbia and found herself a world of arty glamour in Fitzrovia. She was the Euston Road Venus to William Coldstream, Victor Pasmore, Lucian Freud and other lovers who painted and adored her youth, her over-compensating fierceness of opinion, her looks and some mysterious sadness that she carried inside. She was an insecure, uneducated girl who glorified men ...”

“... of meaning and reference. ‘At least one reader’ turns out, fifty pages later, to have been William Empson. Brown refers, with irrefutable accuracy, to ‘an American woman actress’, ‘Infidelity’ seems to have some occult meaning for him, because he alludes, in a passage about ‘The Dead’, to Gabriel’s ‘fascination with his wife’s ...”

“... of whether Rhodes was justified in his obsession with ‘expansion’ has long gone stale. William Kelleher Storey’s new Life turns our attention from Rhodes the visionary to the ruthless coloniser, who often pitted himself against imperial officialdom and its watery idealism. He is interested mainly in the persistence with which Rhodes created ...”

“... treatment of religion and a Harlem only barely understood south of 125th Street, was compared to William James and William Faulkner. In Paris in 1950 Baldwin had read A Portrait of the Artist and its hero’s story was not lost on him. The need to do battle with religion and his own oppressed nation, some of whose members ...”

“... new Lurie doesn’t resemble a Bradbury or Lodge, or for that matter an early Lurie, so much as William Boyd’s Stars and Bars, which also investigates how members of one Anglophone culture don’t merely observe but exploit the other one. The protagonists in the new Lurie and Boyd novels are diffident people in mid-life, misfits or at least ...”