“... the accusation which Yeats thirsted for (at least once) is forthcoming: You got the chance, William, the chance of your words, since courage and beauty had their flagpoles through your side. You acknowledged them in one way, but there is an excuse on your lips, the excuse that did not spoil your poetry, for every man has his excuse. In the previous ...”

“... in Barcelona before 1900 it would certainly be the woodcuts by the ‘Beggarstaff Brothers’, James Pryde and William Nicholson, with their drastic simplifications and combinations of form, their thick flowing outlines, their half-lyrical, half-grotesque urban types, their incisive characterisation. Richardson concedes ...”

“... where he encountered modern art in the form of pictures by Gauguin, Wilson Steer, Augustus John, William Nicholson, and woodcuts by Kandinsky, collected by the University’s Vice-Chancellor. Frank Rutter, curator of Leeds Art Gallery, completed the boy’s artistic education. He had already begun to write poems, in free verse influenced by Imagism. Now he ...”

“... The Titanic was a ship of fools. As John Wilson Foster tells us, the grand staircase came in William and Mary style, though the balustrade was Louis XIV; the first-class dining saloon and reception rooms were Jacobean, the restaurant Louis XVI, the lounge Louis XV (Versailles), the reading and writing-room late Georgian, the smoking-room early ...”

“... of 1849 and the expansion of the railways. Stereotyping flourished; in The Yellow Peril (1982), William F. Wu writes that the Chinese in America ‘were viewed as inscrutable, wildly excitable, of low intelligence, and of high and complex intelligence ... as extremely able workers yet low on the evolutionary scale. Occupational stereotypes include tong ...”

“... Ironically, Coleman’s ostentatious deference to the authority figures in Lennon’s life – William Ernest Pobjoy, the luckless headmaster of Quarry Bank Grammar School, once tannoyed at Goodison Park to deal with an outbreak of Lennonist insurbordination, Aunt Mimi (‘the guitar’s alright as a hobby, but you’ll never make a living’), and the ...”

“... has not happened in Australia. There is nothing comparable to the influence of Walt Whitman, Henry James or T.S. Eliot, say, on contemporary English practice and critical attitudes, or of Ruben Dario and Luis Borges on the practice of their craft in Spain. Nor is anything of the sort yet in sight. I have perhaps wandered rather far from the book I have ...”

“... back of the Labour Government had been broken. Harold Wilson resigned, and begged his successor, James Callaghan, to carry out a full-scale investigation into what he felt had been the subversion of his office by the security services. Callaghan refused. Although Wilson continued with his allegations, the security services felt reprieved. Wright’s ...”

“... British political history, as Rab Butler shrewdly remarked in 1940, was not the ultra-respectable William Pitt – a pilot who in fact failed to weather the storm – but the raffish, unreliable Charles James Fox, another politician with no deep attachment to the social order. Certainly Churchill wanted to preserve ...”

“... Kennedy spoke to just before he was shot – ‘He was always alert for a glimpse of Sisters,’ William Manchester says with unconscious irony – re-lives and reconstructs that day in November 1963, teaches history to her pupils as an immediate and bewildering experience. Oswald gets ready, thinks he is to kill Governor Connally, not Kennedy; David ...”

“... construction. We are told that the Union failed to work because the then prime minister, William Pitt the Younger, did not create a ‘United Kingdom identity’ following the 1801 Act, and a policy of ‘inertia’ towards Ireland soon prevailed. The best attempts at incorporative policies, according to Townshend, were Catholic Emancipation in ...”

“... the former secretary of state, one of the begetters of the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive war; William Perry, the former US secretary of defence; James Mattis, Trump’s future first secretary of defence, who thought that Theranos blood tests would be a ‘game changer’ in battlefield medicine. Naturally, all those men ...”

“... that was nimble, intelligent and powerfully athletic. After riding a pirouetting Andalusian horse, William Cavendish, the Duke of Newcastle, reported that ‘I was so dizzy that I could hardly sit in the saddle.’ A ‘carrousel’ for Louis XIV, 1662 Pluvenal’s greatest refinement was the extravaganza of pomp that became known as the carrousel, a word ...”

“... up by the Government, saying there could be ‘no peace and security with Mr Taylor in power’. James Brabazon, a journalist who has travelled with Lurd, reports that many of the rebels fought against Taylor during the previous civil war and were not integrated into the Government Army when he became President. Lurd’s human rights record is said by some ...”

“... as sophisticated and as consistent in their styles, worldviews, personal ‘signatures’ as, say, William Faulkner – and thanks to Cahiers, few cinephiles would today think of disputing that. They were, however, less successful in their wager in the 1960s and 1970s, at the height of modern French radicalism, that film criticism should be written ‘as ...”