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“... Where are you, my child/The other calling Mother.’Hints of an Elizabethan register – the King James Bible, or King Lear – pervade the poems of Say Something Back. It’s there in the volume’s opening poem, ‘Maybe; maybe not’, a rewriting of St Paul: ‘When I was a child I spoke as a thrush, I/thought as a clod, I understood as a stone ...”

“... was sentenced to seven years, Ellis to six years and Keeling to two years. The recorder of London, James Miskin, berated Ridgewell and Ellis: ‘Without any excuse or explanation, you helped others ship out of this depot Lord knows how much stolen property, and I shall never know where it went or who got what from the proceeds.’After his conviction, there ...”

“... purely private mission of exploration it might be right for the Englishman to execute a bad native porter to encourage the others.’ In his last novel, Sick Heart River (1941), described by his secretary as ‘so unlike him, so introspective’, the dying Sir Edward Leithen spends his last days saving indigenous Canadians in the name of ‘the brotherhood of ...”

“... a lie, but by then it felt like one. When I told Jimmy Madeiros, the manager of the Underground Porter-Packer division at Harrods, where I worked for a few months, that my father had recently died, and that therefore I couldn’t continue with the job, I was telling the truth. But it felt like a lie because I had the sense that he didn’t really believe ...”

“... to ‘British and Irish Authors’, a high-quality series which includes Patrick Parrinder on James Joyce and John Batchelor on H.G. Wells. Barnard gets a great deal into his short book, presenting a rather different Keats from that of the many other Keats scholars and biographers. Keats’s vividness has been present to his admirers in many forms. In ...”

“... among other authors, from Dante to Emily Dickinson, and from Erasmus to Kierkegaard and Cole Porter, and it situates reading among a set of other activities, like listening to jazz or Mahler or looking at Rothko. How many other high-powered critical works, I wonder, have Buñuel next to Sir Thomas Browne in the index, or Stan Getz, next to Giotto? Bowie ...”

“... is comical, or ignore each other and look out of the picture at you (as Van Dyck and Endymion Porter do in the oval double portrait from the Prado). Alternatively, one of them may look at you, and the other at his (or her) partner or at some unspecified point outside the picture, as in the portrait of Lord Digby and Lord Russell – either way, the missed ...”

“... the full colonels had joined up in the 18th century). The otherwise tolerably rational ” Sir James Graham, First Lord of the Admiralty, thought fighting alongside the French was ‘unnatural’ and refused to allow British ships to carry French troops. The prime minister, Lord Aberdeen, had expected war with France rather than Russia. Neither he nor ...”

“... Hogarth’, exemplified in particular in a critique of his work by the Irish painter and critic James Barry. Acknowledging Hogarth’s merit – his ‘admirable fund of invention’, the moral quality of his satire, ‘seldom or never employed in a dishonest or unmanly way’ – Barry had nevertheless claimed that his ‘general aim’ was not to ‘reach ...”

“... a little magazine named after one of Roussel’s works, Locus Solus: Ashbery, Kenneth Koch and James Schuyler were collaborators. It ran for four issues and included the founders’ work alongside that of Barbara Guest, Frank O’Hara, Edwin Denby and others. Locus Solus was like the intersection of New York, Paris and a Surrealist Arcady.Mathews credited ...”

“... the more aristocratic foreign visitors to London’, making it sound like something out of a Henry James novel. Newnham-Davis wrote that Mrs Myra Washington dined there, an American who knew ‘most people who are worth knowing in Europe’. As she sat at her table, her ‘cream-coloured miracle of a dress’ was reflected in all the mirrors. What​ explains ...”

“... the same scale and brimming with booty from Versailles and the Doges’ Palace. According to Henry James, Hannah was ‘large, coarse, Hebrew-looking, with hair of no particular colour and personally unattractive’ (ah, the exquisite sensibility of the novelist), but he had to concede that she was good-natured, sensible and kind, and the 12 years she and ...”

“... World War, the volatile and charismatic lawyer Edward Carson, together with his energetic deputy James Craig, mobilised Ulster Protestants of all classes to resist Home Rule. Carson, who had served as solicitor-general in Lord Salisbury’s Administration, colluded in the illegal shipment of 25,000 rifles and three million rounds of ammunition from Germany ...”

“... be as zealous in stopping people throwing orange peel on the pavement, in case an overburdened porter slipped on it, broke his leg and became unable to feed his family, as they were in chasing after highwaymen. They should stop fishwives throwing the guts of mackerel carelessly away, perhaps to besmirch the white silk stockings of a foreigner who would ...”

“... confident than ever in the object of his faith.’ Tried and tested, Cash comes forth as gold. In James Mangold’s much-hailed biopic, Walk the Line, the mythic retelling of Cash’s story is, naturally, Greek rather than Christian, Hollywood’s standard method being to take the legacy and the legends of the Greeks and to give them a little Christian twist ...”