“... taken. Then the Troubles flared up again; and the IRA bombing campaign came to the mainland; and John McGrath wrote The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil; and suddenly it was 1974, and there were two close-run general elections, and not only did the Ulster Unionists matter even in England, but so did a couple of hitherto obscure and eccentric ...”

“... barn-like structure, set – in 1952 at least – in several acres of woodland. Water Music by John Cage, a Californian composer whose recent work had been feted in New York, opened the programme and baffled its audience. It involved Tudor performing various actions at seemingly random intervals: blowing a duck-call, tuning a radio, shuffling and dealing ...”

“... nurtured; some of these friends, notably the Earl of Oxford and the Queen’s physician, Dr John Arbuthnot, helped protect him from his detractors. After Pope’s death, he found friends among writers who could not have known him. Samuel Johnson’s Life (1781), though often dismissive of poems we now value, strongly countered Warton’s general ...”

“... Among the illustrations in this book is a painting by John Closterman of the Marlborough family which hangs today in Blenheim Palace. On its right-hand side, as convention dictates, sits the head of the family, John Churchill, at the time of the painting, first Earl of Marlborough ...”

“... Readers of John Updike’s previous novel, The Witches of Eastwick, will not have forgotten Darryl Van Horne’s bottom: how, at the end of a game of tennis, Darryl dropped his shorts and thrust his hairy rump into his partner’s face, demanding that she kiss it, which she did. In Roger’s Version the roles are reversed ...”

“... William Ansah Sessarakoo’s​ father, John Corrantee of Annamaboe, on the Gold Coast, was a member of the Fante ruling family and a prominent merchant, well known in the interior and among European slave traders. In order to strengthen ties with his European business partners, and to give his heirs an advantage over their countrymen, Corrantee sent one of his sons to be educated in France and another – Sessarakoo – in England ...”

“... lines of a slightly later poem, An Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot (1735): ‘Shut, shut the door, good John! fatigu’d I said,/Tye up the knocker, say I’m sick, I’m dead.’ Although the title informs us that Pope’s close friend Dr John Arbuthnot is the addressee, and although the poem was published in order to ...”

“... ushered into a large hall containing about a hundred people … Many of the inhabitants underwent major brain operations, and consequently many were shaven-headed. Others were swathed in bandages and were disfigured by post-operative bruises and black eyes.The patients were dressed in hospital-issue clothing and had no personal possessions. I wondered where ...”

“... and Ravensbrück; plenty of Goya, Seurat, Manet; Kim Novak almost drowning in Vertigo, the old major dying in The Magnificent Ambersons; Ivan the Terrible and Stalin; Hitler in one frame immediately followed by James Stewart in another, focusing his camera in Rear Window; an extraordinary bit of cross-cutting between a dance scene in An American in Paris ...”

“... writes, ‘dances like Salomé’ between Picasso and Rousseau, with Picasso as art’s ‘new John the Baptist’ and Rousseau a ‘sentimental Herod’.The Barnes show attempts to free Laurencin from such patronising comparisons. It is the fourth in the foundation’s series of exhibitions on female French modernists, which began with Berthe Morisot in ...”

“... to commit suicide, but the coroner decided it was an accident. While the premature deaths of, say, John Berryman and Delmore Schwartz and Sylvia Plath seemed somehow implicit in the trajectory of their careers, there was nothing remotely maudit about Jarrell, until the last couple of years of his life, when the approach of his 50th birthday induced a bout of ...”

“... opened to ‘anyone who wished’ to see it, an occasion that coincided with the festivities of St John the Baptist, Florence’s patron saint, when the city put its richest treasures on view. For Vasari, the extraction of the David from a mangled block of marble was nothing short of a miracle; Michelangelo had succeeded in ‘bringing back to life one who was ...”

“... A rich​ old American in John Banville’s new novel makes an amused distinction between money and small change. Asked what money is, he just laughs. This is not malevolent laughter but he does do a dangerous thing with his money. He leaves a lot of it, when he dies, to a young American niece. She is grateful, of course, and the money enhances her freedom – at first ...”

“... after all, interesting in their own right. The plot sometimes creaks, though no more loudly than John Spurling’s The Ragged End or Ben Elton’s eco-farce Stark. These books try for the global range and include by reference and implication huge volumes of contemporary history. Stories which bring in two world wars or the coming eco-crisis or the sunset of ...”

“... capital sniffing out the news. Writers like H. R. Knickerbocker, Malcolm Muggeridge, Eugene Lyons, John Gunther and Walter Duranty were our eyes and cars in the world. The milieux in which these men functioned in the Twenties and Thirties were turbulent and romantic. Moving constantly between Paris, Berlin and Moscow, they knew each other; they frequented the ...”