“... I write as I type, or I type as I write (do cats eat bats or do bats eat cats?). ‘Whatever they may do,’ the bibliographer Roger Stoddard has noted, ‘authors do not write books.’ Leah Price and Pamela Thurschwell take up the distinction and declare that their volume will focus ‘on the representation, self-representation and non-representation, in ...”

“... In May 1804, at the age of 18, Benjamin Robert Haydon left his home in Plymouth and set off for London to become a great artist. His mother was distraught, his father furious, but there was no doubt in Haydon’s mind either of his vocation or of his genius. He could have worked in his father’s bookshop and inherited a secure, independent income but he didn’t want to ...”

“... to South Africa? So it’s that bad? My translator’s brother is an apiarist in Plovdiv. He may not be an apiarist much longer, though, because this year all his bees have been born without wings. Without wings? ‘It is a mutation.’ What causes it? ‘We do not know.’ Other apiarists have found the same. Chernobyl? ‘We do not know.’ In Bulgaria ...”

“... least – the General’s grandson. The most remarkable case, though, is that of the press tycoon, Robert Hersant – the third richest man in France. Hersant’s Vichyite and anti-semitic past does not make him an attractive candidate: the last time he stood in a parliamentary election in one of the safest conservative seats in France, he was roundly ...”

“... Little Review, serialised the novel.) Bryher financially supported her lover H.D. and her husband Robert McAlmon, who published Mina Loy, Djuna Barnes and Ernest Hemingway. There is also the suggestion, never quite substantiated by Souhami, that the way these women lived, their promiscuity and outsized influence, could itself be considered uniquely ...”

“... driven them into the arms of the deep state, whose prevaricating representatives – in particular Robert Mueller, who before being appointed as special investigator into alleged Trump-Russia collusion was the longest-serving director of the FBI since J. Edgar Hoover – have been transformed by the mainstream media into paragons of integrity. Why these people ...”

“... listen that he was headed for the White House. He mapped out a plan to get there from which, as Robert Caro writes, ‘he refused to be diverted.’ It meant first establishing himself in state politics, then winning a seat in the House of Representatives, then moving up to the Senate and finally to the highest office. He was undaunted by the fact that no ...”

“... Robert Lowell wrote the poem ‘Water’ about being on the coast of Maine in the summer of 1948 with Elizabeth Bishop; he put it first in his collection For the Union Dead, which he published in 1964. He sent Bishop a draft of the poem in March 1962, explaining that it was ‘more romantic and grey than the whole truth, for all has been sunny between us ...”

“... presented to King Louis-Philippe at the Château St-Cloud in 1846 by the renowned French magician Robert-Houdin. An account can be found in his Memoirs: I borrowed from my noble spectators several handkerchiefs which I made into a parcel and laid on the table. Then at my request different persons wrote on the cards the names of the places whither they ...”

“... in the writings of Spinoza and Kant and represented in our own day by the theories of John Rawls, Robert Nozick and others (though these writers differ in how ‘universal’ they intend their principles to be). The essays collected in Morality and Conflict chronicle a movement in the author’s thought from philosophical theory of this kind to the view that ...”

“... theological certainties and subtleties, which the experts understand and which some of them may well think consistent with their own religious positions. Conventional pieties do occasionally peep through the prose of the catalogue and the TV commentaries, where they are rather heavily underlined by John Tavener’s music for the title ...”

“... neither of which can afford to let the other win uncontested control of the country. Lebanon may well be the ‘battleground of the Middle East’, as Hirst’s subtitle puts it, but this does not explain how it has become a lethal trap for its tormentors. The absence of government appears to make the country easy meat, but would-be occupiers find that ...”

“... was of US making: a dispatch sent to the Italian police in March 2003 which claimed that Omar ‘may have travelled’ to ‘an unknown country in the Balkans’. This (vague) false trail may have encouraged the police not to take too much trouble over the investigation. The case went cold, in part because the judge then ...”

“... that good public life could only be made up of the actions of good individual men – which may explain why, in a quixotic gesture unique in the history of politics, he gave away one-fifth of his personal fortune to the nation in the financial crisis of 1919. The meaning and consequences of Baldwin’s vision may be ...”

“... their mock at our accursed lot.If we must die, o let us nobly die,So that our precious blood may not be shedIn vain; then even the monsters we defyShall be constrained to honour us though dead!O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!What though before us lies the ...”