“... Kauffman were friends, while the younger Cosway began her career, as her critical friend James Northcote wrote, ‘filled with the highest expectations of being … another Angelica Kauffman’. Le Brun and Cosway coincided several times in Paris, where Cosway cut a lesser figure. She was scathing in her diary about her French rival, who probably had ...”

“... on the various ways in which Cather – in Acocella’s view the only American novelist besides James to rival Tolstoy and Flaubert for beauty of style and moral depth – had been manhandled by contemporary academic critics. The story Acocella told was one of noble articulation – Cather’s poised, pared-down imaginative utterance – overwhelmed by ...”

“... the Human Body. Frances Reynolds, Joshua Reynolds’s younger sister, explained to the Academician James Northcote that she did, out of propriety, ‘draw all her figures cloath’d’, except infants, ‘which she often paints from life’, Northcote reported, using ‘some beggar woman’s child which is laid naked on a pillow’. Kauffman, whose large ...”

“... to deal in headlines not footnotes, which wrecked him for some but made him a hero to me. In Henry James’s ‘The Lesson of the Master’, Henry St George, the older novelist, offers the young writer Paul Overt a demonstration in self-sufficiency. He tells him a writer would do better not to marry, to put his passion into his work. Then marries the girl they ...”

“... predecessor is lost – the first ever detective story or civilised thriller. The drama critic James Agate, who once savagely described Donald Wolfit’s Hamlet as a private detective watching the jewels at the Claudius-Gertrude wedding feast, may have said more than he knew. Yet to praise Hamlet as the first detective story makes sense mainly in terms of ...”

“... went on to publish. ‘Where else could it be placed?’ Heaney asked Dennis O’Driscoll, his Boswell. The contrast between the two signature poems is striking. Heaney finds in the spectacle of his father digging a model for his own poetic enterprise: he is obliged to use his pen where ‘the old man’ used a spade, but in some sense he is continuing in ...”

“... invites study.) Two important correspondences in particular have recently come to light: one with James Harris of Salisbury, the author of Hermes, whom Johnson called ‘a prig, and a bad prig’, but who was a warm friend to Fielding, lent him money sometimes, and wrote an unpublished essay on his ‘Life and Genius’; the other concerned with Fielding’s ...”

“... It was as though an artist such as Picasso, whose father was a failed painter, or William James, whose father was a failed essayist, or V.S. Naipaul, sought to compensate for his father’s failure while at the same time using his talent as a way of killing the father off, showing his mother who was the real man in the household. Jorge Luis Borges was ...”

“... popular Bay Area psychic, a friend to Allen Ginsberg and the Beats and the experimental filmmaker James Broughton and a prominent gay political activist.) Despite Arthur’s chronic selfishness, Esther appears to have treated him in a generous if not saintly spirit. He ended up extracting quite of lot of money from her and decades after they split was still ...”