“... he is known to have offered the ‘Roman murder story’ to a number of his friends (including Anthony Trollope and Tennyson) and the idea that he himself might make something of it seems to have come to him only after Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s death in 1861 and his return to England later the same year. The poem, whose roots go back to Browning’s ...”

“... China, a man who fascinates Steiner and whom he wanted to write about in Frank Kermode’s Modern Masters series, published in the 1970s. Steiner had first seen Needham at a protest meeting against Anglo-American intervention in Korea in 1950, at which the distinguished scientist claimed to have incontrovertible proof of the use of germ warfare by the ...”

“... mental effects on one’s body isn’t a new, uniquely Californian thing. The early moderns were masters of the Great Neurotic Art. At the same time, it was widely, if not universally, acknowledged between traditional physicians and their patients that appetite was a pretty good guide to the healthfulness of foods. If you liked it, it probably liked you: the ...”

“... public, and a recognised ‘act’. In 1978, Berlin wrote a private letter to the psychiatrist Anthony Storr, wondering why he, a beloved only child, should still be visited with the feeling that his many attainments were ‘of very little or of no value’. This takes us some way beyond the pose of false modesty, but nowhere near as far as self-hatred.I ...”

“... woman’s – story. Today the only female member of the incomparable succession of European Old Masters, Artemisia Gentileschi was not a canonical painter when Banti decided to make her the principal character in a novel. Still, this particular life might seem an obvious subject for this author. Banti’s first decade of writing, the 1920s, was devoted to ...”

“... Hall Caine, G.K. Chesterton, Arthur Conan Doyle, John Galsworthy, Thomas Hardy, Maurice Hewlett, Anthony Hope, W.J. Locke, E.V. Lucas, J.W. Mackail, John Masefield, A.E.W. Mason, Gilbert Murray, Henry Newbolt, Owen Seaman, G.M. Trevelyan, H.G. Wells and Israel Zangwill (Arthur Quiller-Couch and Rudyard Kipling sent messages of support). At first glance, this ...”

“... rogue vents – from Eric von Stroheim in The Great Gabbo to Michael Redgrave in Dead of Night and Anthony Hopkins in Magic – who have been led astray by their dummy-selves; and real vents can be just as mixed up as fictional ones. When the English entertainer Arthur Prince died in 1948, his jolly partner Jim was interred with him, and they were joined in ...”

“... pith.’ Or it might be a locker room, where ‘hair pieces like Skye terriers waited for their masters’; or a courtroom, where a lawyer called Cannibal Pinsker has ‘a large yellow cravat that lay on his shirt like a cheese omelette’; or an old man’s trouser fly, three feet long. As a writer, Bellow sees. He sees the bare toes of Pierre Thaxter ...”

“... Two days filming my TV parables programme Heavenly Stories at Dulwich College, the setting the Masters’ Library, a galleried, High Victorian room adjoining the school hall, presumably where the masters foregather before assembly. Over the chimneypiece are two crude allegorical panels of Piety and Liberality, the ideals ...”

“... Dory consists of pastiches of Bowie’s musical heroes of the 1960s – John Lennon, Syd Barrett, Anthony Newley, Bob Dylan, the Velvet Underground. Which would make Ziggy Stardust the beautiful butterfly that emerged from the chrysalis. Paul Trynka begins his biography with a description of Bowie’s performance of ‘Starman’ on Top of the Pops on 5 July ...”

“... flunkeys and conspiracy theories, has obliged his administration’s scientific authorities, Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx, to tiptoe around his volcanic ego. The blithe inaction and bumbling born of ideological vanity have resulted in tens of thousands of avoidable deaths in both countries, with ethnic minorities heavily ...”

“... down the stairs into the charming toy brightness of the German room to the Brueghels and the Masters of Tired Eyes and Silver Windows. The young woman of Rembrandt is splendid.’ In his story ‘Ding-Dong’, he described the face of the pedlar woman: ‘Yet like tormented faces that he had seen, like the face in the National Gallery in Merrion Square ...”

“... the African presence are revealed here. First, there was a subculture of slave ownership by white masters, although this was illegal under the common law. Newspapers often printed ‘for sale’ or ‘wanted’ advertisements, or asked for runaway slaves to be returned. Second, there were well-connected Africans and their sons living openly in the city. By ...”

“... Lynn had a third daughter, Alison, with Irving, and Leslie had two more children, Diana and Anthony Stone. It’s Di too who most strongly links and splits Love’s Work with the famously ‘forbidding’ The Broken Middle, in which it appears in a new guise as Di-remption, ‘modernity’s ancient predicament’, as Rose introduces it, ‘this ...”

“... the man obliged to seal the deal was the Labour MP for Grimsby, the then foreign secretary, Anthony Crosland.Barred from the rich fisheries off Iceland, Hardie turned to Norway, which, although it was outside the EEC, offered EEC fishing vessels the chance to fish there under a quota system negotiated through Brussels.* One time he arrived off Norway ...”