“... there are forty occasions when someone has a drink. It begins in Gorizia, where our hero, Frederic Henry (he’d better have his name; we’re going to be with him for a while), sits watching the snow falling while he drinks a bottle of Asti with a friend. Later, over too much wine and Strega, he explains to a priest his regret at not having gone to ...”

“... the personal loyalties and affections which compromised the reign of Richard. Bolingbroke’s son, Henry V, celebrates his coronation day by abruptly banishing his substitute father, Falstaff (whose projected future role as royal favourite has been pointedly modelled in miniature towards the end of Henry IV Part 2 by the ...”

“... criminal underworld. The Kansas City of his youth was known for its card sharks and conmen. Jesse James was not long dead and the murder rate outstripped Chicago’s. But it was also a town preoccupied with respectability. Farm boys on the make wore suits, mob bosses dined early with their families in ersatz châteaux and the legendary jazz scene – Truman ...”

“... Her father, a partner in a successful clothing business, liked to go by his middle name, Henry, rather than the more Jewish Jacob. Her mother, Eliza, died when she was just four, followed, when she was nine, by an unloved stepmother (Henry’s ‘second Christian schoolteacher’, Parker’s biographer Marion Meade ...”

“... One particularly turbulent paragraph cites, in no particular order, George Sturt, J.A. Baker, James Agee, Herman Melville, Richard Henry Dana Jr, Knut Hamsun and Elizabeth Smart. But I’m not being entirely fair. For one of these writers has already been singled out for extensive analysis.It’s an odd ...”

“... With his first earnings as a garden labourer, the boy walked to Aberdeen and bought six volumes of James Hervey’s Reflections on a Flower Garden – just as Clare had tramped from Helpston to Stamford, before the bookshop opened, to secure a coveted copy of James Thomson’s The Seasons. And like Clare, Sinclair paused on ...”

“... seductively in his recent memoir, Between the World and Me. Formally modelled on the first part of James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, the book is addressed to Coates’s teenage son, Samori, on the occasion of the non-indictment of Brown’s killer, a white police officer called Darren Wilson. ‘We are captured, brother, surrounded by the majoritarian ...”

“... arrest for a crime he didn’t commit. As he’s driven away by the police, the musician (it’s Henry Fonda) glimpses his wife, who doesn’t yet know he’s been arrested, moving around in the kitchen. When describing this scene to Truffaut, Hitchcock dwelled on details that either weren’t in the film to begin with, or got edited out. At the corner of ...”

“... they often made attempts to identify cities known from biblical and classical sources. Claudius James Rich, of the East India Company, correctly identified, explored and mapped Babylon and Nineveh, and visited many other sites. Excavation and extraction began in earnest in 1842, when Paul-Emile Botta, the French consul, dug huge winged bulls and wall slabs ...”

“... panic occurred’. Berlin mentions this, jokily and in passing, in several letters, but Alice James, the wife of William James’s son Billy, gets the full story of the disaster that didn’t happen, at least to Berlin. ‘I saw a thin flame crawling up the side of my window & decided that it would take at least ten ...”

“... dated from the 15th century. The family’s first hereditary honour was a baronetcy conferred by James I in 1622, largely to raise revenue; the first baronet must have been a disappointment in that regard, as he went to prison for debt in 1629 and again in 1638. His son and heir was imprisoned for political reasons in 1646, and pardoned in 1651. The third ...”

“... fortunes of the Earl of Warwick, but at the end of his life felt guilty for his betrayal of King Henry – as it happens, held prisoner in the same building as Malory, as Malory was actually writing. Many things still remain obscure, even after Field’s detached, painstaking, and blessedly unsentimental sifting of the sources. It seems unlikely that we will ...”

“... in 1788, soon after it was finished, and there is also a small, fine-enamel-on-copper copy by Henry Bone, made ten years later. From these we can see more clearly not only what Reynolds saw, but how Hunter saw himself. He is dressed in the rumpled velvet suit of the intellectual in the privacy of his study. On his table the ink is uncorked; his right hand ...”

“... to the richest fifth of the population. Always a city of ‘Progress and Poverty’ (the title of Henry George’s bestseller of the 1880s), New York today is more polarised economically than anywhere else in the US – a fact explained in part by the decline of the labour movement. Joshua Freeman’s Working-Class New York chronicles the events from 1945 to ...”

“... railings made into shrapnel and grenade, acanthus leaf and fleur-de-lys, victorious artillery, James Cagney films (the only art Harrison shared with his father). When he alludes to other poems, they are mostly poems the War turned into momentously general truths, as in an echo of Empson: It’s not diseases, but the void that kills, The space, the ...”