“... the ‘Imperator’ and ‘Sâr’ (a title he claimed was bestowed on his family by a Babylonian king) of a Rosicrucian order called the Rose + Croix esthétique, which Satie joined as its in-house composer. For the inauguration of the Salon de la Rose + Croix, the order’s cultural wing, Satie composed three ‘Sonneries’ for trumpets and harps. No ...”

“... in photographs sent to loved ones back home – Aladdin, Lady Precious Stream, or the Black King at Christ’s nativity, among other Orientals. The sequence of inversions and impersonations in the scene where Mr Rochester disguises himself as a Gypsy woman and tells Jane’s fortune is dizzy-making: insider playing outsider, master subordinate, male ...”

“... Nothing was worth saving, and Wisner began to build a new network. Then, on 23 August 1944, King Michael of Romania ended his alliance with Germany.Wisner was ordered to Bucharest to ‘establish the intentions of the Soviet Union regarding Romania’. An advance party of nine agents had been sent ahead of him, including Beverly Bowie, who achieved the ...”

“... Alice, ‘without pictures or conversation?’Once upon a time there was …        ‘A King!’ my little readers will say at once.        No, children, you are wrong. Once upon a time there was a piece of wood.All children, except one, grow up.All children grow up: those who write for children need, therefore, to write fiction that will ...”

“... plays on the stage in the 1940s and 1950s; 12 years in the case of his latest and best biographer, John Lahr; or even as little as six weeks by me while reading Lahr’s absorbing Life, along with the work, and a big chunk of all the stuff Williams wrote and said about the work – is to learn and relearn how soberly Williams was speaking when he told ...”

“... currency of account. It was a major coup for what was then a small commercial centre. There was no king’s or duke’s head on the florin. Florence had long since banned nobility from involvement in its government, which was now republican, the nine executive members elected by lot from among the patrician community every two months, so that no one person ...”

“... at having connived at his father’s arrest for treason in Nahum Tate’s 1681 acting version of King Lear, Regan whispers to him: ‘The Grotto, Sir, within the lower Grove,/Has Privacy to suit a Mourner’s Thought.’ The next scene duly opens on ‘A Grotto’, where we find ‘Edmund and Regan amorously Seated, Listning to Musick’. But ...”

“... asked the plump girl in a lively way. ‘Is it some jewels you’ve had cut-price from the King of Sikkim?’ ‘No,’ muttered Logan, as he fingered the bindings and the leaves inside the grey little parcel. ‘It’s Natural Learning is what it is. George Gokhale must have found some copies. It’s from George Gokhale and I don’t expect I’ll see ...”

“... not unprecedented: what really distinguished Gray’s epic postmodernism from the work of, say, John Fowles or Thomas Pynchon was the absolute lucidity of his approach. Lanark was – and remains – intensely readable, combining the narrative hooks of science fiction with the solid satisfactions of the Victorian novel: read the first chapter of Lanark, in ...”

“... witnessed a slow leaching of life away from those parts of Catholic devotional practice that the king had allowed to remain after the dissolution of the monasteries. Edward VI presided enthusiastically over a wholesale assault on this Catholic tradition which, if he had not died in his teens, would probably have eliminated all church organs and any ...”

“... load, in a cycle repeated many times over – ‘more than one thousand cartloads’, according to John Stow – before the carters could be paid and sent home. Afterwards, the area was covered over with ‘soylage of the citie’ … [T]he carts were filled with human remains … [which] had been lodged in the great ossuary of the cathedral … located under ...”

“... out that in fact he went back to England for a few years, where his time at Oxford overlapped with John Ruskin’s tenure as Slade Professor of Fine Art. Rhodes wasn’t there to hear Ruskin give his inaugural lecture – the one about England’s duty to ‘found colonies as fast and as far as she is able, formed of her most energetic and worthiest ...”

“... like some of Mr Carter-Ruck’s clients, seems to be an over-sensitive upper-class twit. The King has some good advice: Forget, forgive, conclude and be agreed; Our doctors say this is no month to bleed. That would have been a futile course for a libel lawyer, however, since there would have been no damages, perhaps even no costs. The ...”

“... very much on the minds of the authors of the new three-volume biography of D.H. Lawrence, of which John Worthen’s D.H. Lawrence: The Early Years 1885-1912 is the first instalment. The theory, as Worthen explains it, is that having three different people write the life will be ‘an explicit (even dramatic) acknowledgment that, however, important the ...”

“... he was a Princeton undergraduate (as I was almost fifty years later) with F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Peale Bishop, at a time of what seems now like relatively uncomplicated Wasp hegemony there and in the arts generally. His ties with that university remained deep, not only through his literary friends, but also through Christian Gauss, the dean of the ...”