“... he had recently interviewed suspected that ‘a great many of the boys and a good many of the masters’ regarded music with indifference, and some with ‘positive contempt’, since musicians as a class were thought to be ‘maiden ladies and foreigners with long hair, and educated Englishmen did not sing’. Sir William Henry Hadow, a leading ...”

“... of bogus erudition – the Brexit white paper was, he said, ‘the greatest vassalage since King John paid homage to Philip II at Le Goulet in 1200’ – and he must have enjoyed expressing his hope that it would ‘not be necessary for Her Majesty’s stay at Sandringham to be interrupted by her in person having to prorogue Parliament’. Speaking the next ...”

“... the catalogue commentary requires the combined efforts of Colin Amery, Mary Lutyens, Jane Brown, John Cornforth, Gavin Stamp and John Summerson to do justice to an architect whose career, in its range, dimensions and achievements, outshines Wren, Vanbrugh and the Adam brothers. Cloud-capp’d towers, gorgeous ...”

“... and melos. Like most Post-Modernist fantasies, Sabbatical takes a lot of unpacking. But this is John Barth in holiday mood, and a virtuoso display of techniques brought together from different kinds of novel is here frankly offered for enjoyment. One of its methods is purely realistic: it is full of information, for instance, about sailing in the Chesapeake ...”

“... bridge over the river; until at last you get to Roscommon town, somewhere you might have heard of. John McGahern’s new novel demands a kind of triangulation if you’re to make sense of it. Carrick-on-Shannon is (perhaps) a short drive away; in the other direction you’ll get to Longford in a while. If you don’t try to make sense of it, the barely ...”

“... and sold still from one Planter to another, or attached as horses or beasts for the debts of their masters’. Many had been badly beaten. Having fled from the ‘disconsolate vault’ of Barbados, they were terrified that they might be recognised and returned to the Caribbean. ‘I am escaped,’ one said in a letter to an MP, ‘I cannot say free, but ...”

“... a stringer for the Observer and the Economist. Beirut made good sense as a posting: his father, St John Philby, a well-known Arabist, was living there at the time, and the Middle East was an area of growing interest to British intelligence. For the first few months, Philby lived with his father in the village of Ajaltoun a few miles outside Beirut. Despite ...”

“... taken over by the making of variations – mostly sets of them – on complex compositions by the masters, often compositions with a sizeable cast of characters; during those years he did remarkably few other paintings of much interest (a notable exception is a series of small paintings of reclining nudes – one of them is in the show – done in April ...”

“... According to John Ruskin, ‘in the work of the great masters death is always either heroic, deserved, or quiet and natural.’ Not so in Marguerite Yourcenar’s world. She is renowned for her timeless narrative gift and lucid style, and she regards her books as defining that unfashionable thing, an ‘ideal of humanity ...”

“... the mood of the poilus, who fought their opponents until the death, cheered on by their civilian masters. For the first time, and probably the last, war produced class solidarity among all fighting men, and contempt for the leaders back home: the next time would be different, with national ideologies sustaining a mechanised conflict that included all ...”

“... that he is in ‘good health’ and rumours about teams of doctors and treatment by qigong masters who can infuse health-giving energy into a patient without physical contact. When the news comes, we will still have to make up our minds about Deng. The Beijing intellectuals who owed their post-Mao liberation to His Excellency were sharply disenchanted ...”

“... purges to which it has been subject, and the chronic distrust it arouses in all its political masters. None of the purges and shake-ups has ever been quite complete: they have always left a cave within the organisation owing loyalty to the ancien régime and not above sabotaging their new political masters in the hope ...”

“... include one of Thomas Holcroft and William Godwin, as spectators at the trial of fellow radical John Thelwall, that shows every sign of being done swiftly, but delicately, on the spot; portraits like that of Mary Hamilton, made in 1789, show his flattering response to pretty women in full, early bloom. A study for Satan as the Fallen Angel shows why ...”

“... bar a few hundred miles away from the mud-walled bar near Zaria, in northern Nigeria, where John Haynes’s poem is set. It opens with an evocative drift through the peppery air of the evening marketplace, past the stalls selling stock cubes and mosquito coils, and the smells of fried yam and charcoal fires, towards the coloured lights of Patience’s ...”

“... of architecture is replete with figures whose careers were tied to the fortunes of great cities. John Nash’s genius for town-planning could only have flourished in London during the post-Waterloo boom years. Stanford White’s feeling for opulence fits the New York scene of the 1890s like an evening glove. So, too, did mid-Victorian Glasgow define the ...”