“... bit of money.The tone is rueful rather than envious: on the whole the Impressionists – like most young artists starting out in bands – were generous to one another. Nevertheless, there follows a list of what the Pissarros could not afford: copper plates, an aquatint box, plus the services of a printer. With them, like Cassatt (and with her talent), they ...”

“... as an adult. But in the mid-20th century he was the most popular poet in the United States after Robert Frost, and from early in his career, among the most admired by writers and critics. It wasn’t just the usual modernist suspects like Pound, Williams, Stevens and Marianne Moore who sang his praises, but other, very different kinds of poet too: ...”

“... fiddlers and children. Even on Valentine’s Day, Jeffreys played her part. She wasn’t a young woman – she was at least 55 when the records start – but that didn’t prevent her from being visited by an admirer or two. In 1641, she gave a shilling to Mr Tom Aston and Mr Dick Gravell, who, she wrote, ‘cam to be my valantine’. As a single ...”

“... priesthood. The artist as secular priest crops up as late as Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, as Stephen Dedalus exchanges consecrating the eucharist for that transformation of the bread of daily experience into the host of sacred nourishment which he calls art. Flaubert and James, Proust and Joyce are adepts who immolate themselves on the ...”

“... the 5000 inhabitants exposed to infection, 99.5 per cent caught the disease. John Enders and his young associate T.C. Peebles were the first to grow measles virus in the test tube in 1954, using the tissue culture techniques developed by Enders and his colleagues in the late 1940s. Much good that did him at Harvard. Even though he was awarded the Nobel Prize ...”

“... powerful pre-9/11 samizdat videos, which continue to circulate in the kingdom, encouraging many young people to see their country through his eyes and share his disgust with its ruling family. The solution for them lies only in jihad. The most fearless account of Saudi society in recent years has been Abd al-Rahman Munif’s Cities of Salt quintet of ...”

“... and his ‘fidgety ghost’ – the phrase comes from one of his Pericles-inspired poems, ‘Young Prince of Tyre’ – still haunts Australian poetry. One pictures the poet lugging a battered second-hand typewriter from flea-pit hotels to temporary lodgings, watching through sleepless mosquito-plagued nights (‘Now/Have I found you, my ...”

“... became a highly-paid lecturer. He died in 1944. Leacock held his own in the world of Will Rogers, Robert Benchley, James Thurber, the early Wodehouse, A.P. Herbert and ‘Beachcomber’. Americans, or some of them, accepted him as a successor to Mark Twain. His Yankee-style hyperbole did not, for once, upset the British, for he practised the tricks of ‘sly ...”

“... Berwickshire in August 1914, during which someone reads aloud from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, then appearing in the Egoist, and war is declared. It describes two successive changings of the literary guard: from the Great Victorians to the Great Moderns (Hardy, James, Conrad, Kipling, Wells), and from the Great Moderns to really modern Modernism ...”

“... know enough about foreigners to be able to tell if they were whom they claimed to be. Moreover, as Robert Service reminds us in Spies and Commissars, in the first, formative years after the Bolshevik Revolution, when almost all the capitalist powers sent military forces to support the Bolsheviks’ opponents in the Civil War, most of the resident ...”

“... novels, far fewer imagine themselves as middle-aged. In Britain between the wars a respectable young lady, dependent on her father for an allowance, had limited options. She expected and was expected to marry. A graduate might find professional employment, but the marriage bar stymied careers in many areas, including teaching and the civil ...”

“... Carpenter skilfully weaves the friends – Connolly, Betjeman, Anthony Powell, Brian Howard, Robert Byron – into a completed composition, the others serve chiefly to start a scene or two and swell the progress of Waugh himself. Of course this gives a misleading picture of period and individuals, but that is in a sense the object of the exercise, for ...”

“... in literary journals, attacked Popa. ‘How is it possible that such texts can be written by a young writer and published by a renowned literary magazine?’ one demanded to know. The age demanded paeans to the struggle of the working classes and got avant-garde poetry instead. Others griped about Popa’s hermeticism: even the title of the book is ...”

“... still thinking more about worldwide nuclear war than other forms of killing. The assassination of Robert Kennedy made him think: ‘That is how it can happen, a twitch of the index finger, a madman, a zealot, an aberration in human history ... ’ As Cowling madly digs his hole, reciting his chronicle of the years, he attempts a sort of Catch 22 ...”

“... themes in the Queen’s Robing Room in the new Houses of Parliament. A decade later, a coterie of young, untried artists including Rossetti, Burne-Jones and Morris set out to adorn the walls of the Oxford Union with similar subjects. But neither Dyce nor the high-spirited youths were qualified to paint in fresco, and the Oxford pictures decayed and ...”