“... massive. She learnt the art of public speaking, as well as the simple, accessible language of the King James Bible. Like so many other British politicians over the centuries, she would draw on this source regularly in her speeches, quoting verses, telling homely parables, and infusing everything she said with a fire and earnestness borrowed from the ...”

“... As anyone who has directed a remake of King Kong knows, revisiting classics is a perilous business. However much you claim to stand on the shoulders of the mighty beast, you still risk ending up, like Fay Wray, squeezed in its paw. A.M. Gibbs spends most of the introduction to Bernard Shaw: A Life justifying his decision to return to a very well-ploughed furrow ...”

“... within a wider ecology of making. Theophilus, Diderot and Gropius all viewed the craftsman as king, and the workshop as an unparalleled laboratory of observation. The idea that the artist’s studio was somehow different from the artisan’s workshop took off in the 15th century. In Hall’s phrase, ‘the Renaissance concept of the studio involved a ...”

“... brought fireworks both offensive and benign to the European world. By the 16th century, crowds in Florence and Siena beheld huge wooden wheels, lavishly decorated, spinning on poles and emitting glittering cascades from attached fireworks. The finale in 1579 of the annual display in Rome to mark the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul made the engraver Giovanni ...”

“... of Elizabeth Warren being prevented a few weeks ago from reading out a letter by Coretta Scott King in the US Senate.1 What was extraordinary on that occasion wasn’t only that she was silenced and formally excluded from the debate (I don’t know enough about the rules of procedure in the Senate to have a sense of how justified, or not, that was); but ...”

“... minute letters, as though intended to remain invisible, Andrew has set down Jocasta’s lines from King Oedipus: ‘Fear not thy mother’s marriage bed/For many a man has in his dream/Slept with his mother.’ The incestuous union was consummated some fourteen years later, at the Clavertons’ town house in Curzon Street, during the young man’s first visit ...”

“... him. Julian seemed to have settled for the life of a scholar, for want of an urgent vocation. Florence, who had been so forthright and practical as a girl . . .’ And so Prosper proceeds to ‘think’ about his children. It is hard enough, though not for the Booker judges, to like the historical novel nowadays, but harder still when that novel’s ...”

“... hallucinatory miniatures that decorated manuscripts. At the centre of artistic innovation in Florence, the architecture of the 12th century helped to shape Brunelleschi’s Classicism, and Donatello’s richly expressive sculptures did far more than revive ancient forms. German limewood sculptors, English playwrights and Portuguese architects had ...”

“... Gismondo Cavaletti, a dramatic monologue delivered by a miserable, deformed person in 16th-century Florence, with Savonarola getting burnt, Leonardo da Vinci being callously scientific and plenty of beautiful Florentines being cruel. We half-expect Pippa to pass, as in Savonarola: A Tragedy, by L. Brown. Max Beerbohm, we remember, apologised for the fact that ...”

“... Analects, ‘it benefits all things and does not compete with them.’ Merlin turns the future king into a fish as part of his education in T.H. White’s The Sword in the Stone, and as a fish ‘he could do what men always wanted to do, that is fly. There is practically no difference between flying in water and flying in the air … It was like the dreams ...”

“... detail about Acker’s family, but the few facts she gives us are enough. Her mother’s mother, Florence Weill, was from an Austrian Jewish family, and inherited a small fortune from her husband, whose business had been making gloves. Acker’s mother, Claire, became pregnant at the age of 21, only to be abandoned by the baby’s father; whereupon it looks ...”

“... The Fellowship of the Ring appeared in July 1954, The Two Towers in November and The Return of the King almost a year later, in October 1955. Lewis wrote a dust-jacket puff: ‘No imaginary world has been projected which is at once so multifarious and so true to its inner laws.’ You do not have to admire the book to think that this was true. It is clear from ...”

“... and groan, fall over and blank out, race around the house hyper-anxiously, Doris will not play Florence Nightingale. The unstated position is: you, Clancy, have to take the consequences of what you are. She’s one tough farm girl.’ Clancy fitted easily into Lessing’s louche bohemian scene. He educated her in poker and American jazz. He put her in ...”

“... to work with primary materials rather than ‘to draw on the work of Nick Furbank and Francis King’. An honourable but mistaken decision, if only because much of Furbank’s book is primary material, especially in relation to the later years. A decent but I think inadequate response to my carping would be to cite the author’s own confession that for ...”

“... word Twain used for this project. Several early attempts were quickly abandoned, but at last in Florence in 1904, where he had taken his failing wife in hope of recovery, he ‘hit upon the right way to do an autobiography’, which was not to write it at all, in the conventional sense, but to dictate it, following no particular plan, but speaking only of ...”