“... person of the Undivided Trinity leads to distortions in Art. Thus, in the Sayers scale of values, William Blake is a lop-sided believer in the Father – ‘wrestling with the huge cloudy cosmogonies and highly personal symbolisms of the Prophetic Books’. James Joyce, apparently, was ‘son-ridden’. Ghost-ridden writers ...”

“... a marketing tag, not a manifesto – caused a stir when it was published in the US in June. James Wood reviewed it at length in the New Yorker. Heti, he said, ‘may well have identified a central dialectic of 21st-century postmodern being’, but he also complained that her ‘prose is what one might charitably call basic’. The radical feminist ...”

“... down the boundaries between art and life. The first Shadows, which no longer exists, seemed to William Pechter ‘closer at times to being that elusive entity, a true slice of life, than almost anything else I can think of which claims the name. There is, in effect, no beginning or end to the film – just middle.’ But Pechter found that ‘this quality ...”

“... done had he been in love with her! The other man was one who had engaged Stead as his secretary. William Blech – Bill Blake as he was to become – was a New York Jew, autodidact, intellectual, Marxist, and investments manager of a grain firm then operating out of London. When Blake learned, from a disdainful remark of Duncan’s, that his secretary ...”

“... of this literature. A sort of boisterous good cheer returns in the world of the medical quacks: James Graham, for example, offered his ‘celestial bed’, a king-sized arena of sexual delight, to voluptuaries (so said his enemies) or to infertile couples (so said he, not a little disingenuously). The steep price of bliss kept the bed out of wide ...”

“... fortifies my soul to know/That, though I perish, Truth is so.’ You must feel uneasy at William James’s claim that ‘ideas ... become true just in so far as they help us to get into satisfactory relations with other parts of our experience.’ You must become indignant when Ryan (accurately paraphrasing Dewey) says that ‘to call a ...”

“... maiden name was Kweksylber (‘quicksilver’). He was at various times Joe Liss, Joe Eligmann, James Smith, Joseph Schmidt, Charlie Silver, Charles Greenbaum, Abraham Ramer, Ludwig; these are just a few of his ghost-names. Silver had indeed been in New York City in the early 1890s, a low-grade thief, thug, jailbird and police informer. Convicted of ...”

“... Winston Churchill. One may disapprove of spin, but there are limits. Balfour’s teacher at Eton, William Johnson, described him as ‘fearless, resolved and negligently great’. The sting is in the ‘negligently’; Johnson, author of the ‘Eton Boating Song’, was also the author of the famous and equally sharp judgment on Balfour’s great Liberal ...”

“... was in due course used as a blanket for the infant Langston (a middle name – he was baptised James, after his father). Mary’s next husband, Charles Henry Langston, was an abolitionist too; he insisted they name their son after Nat Turner, the leader of the 1831 Virginia slave revolt. His younger brother, John Langston, became one of the most prominent ...”

“... into art – think of the lush bits of cited advertisements in paintings by Richard Hamilton or James Rosenquist – and the two-way traffic has continued ever since. Then, too, there is the notion of the artist as showman. Art-world impresarios existed before Surrealism – Marinetti qualifies, as does Tzara, not to mention, say, Courbet – but Dalí took ...”

“...  Henry James​’s novel The Princess Casamassima, which dramatises the world of stray revolutionaries in London in the 1880s, depends on energy coming from opposites. The novel’s protagonist, Hyacinth Robinson, appreciates beauty and feels excluded from the world of privilege around him. He lives an interior life ...”

“... always to be in the right’ is the kind of morally reprehensible incident of which Henry James would have made much; he would also have made something out of Elizabeth’s being so upset that he did not come (she had cooked pheasant, John drove to the station) and, more interestingly, out of her decision to grovel rather than embarrass, and ...”

“... productions written for the occasion in a distinctly Pickwickian manner. Its members included William Godwin junior, son of the political philosopher by his second wife, whose account of the origins of Shakespeare’s genius, a poem called ‘Olympian Mulberry Leaves; or, The Offerings of the Gods to Shakespear’, is every bit as Gothic as anything ...”

“... in a riot of onomatopoeia when the song was performed as a round. Harris introduces us to William Merle, who between 1337 and 1344 kept a diary of the weather at Driby in Lincolnshire, one of the earliest such records to survive, and to Sir Gawain watching the seasons turn in the anxious year between his first meeting with the Green Knight and the ...”

“... group and, after Rockingham’s death, its successor the Foxites – followers of Charles James Fox – who, with some success, tried to monopolise the Whig label. Their main opponents, the Pittites, who followed William Pitt the Younger, are often miscategorised as Tories, though they too described themselves as ...”