“... lack certain of the most important early sources: Herbert Croft’s Love and Madness (1780), John Broughton’s edition of the Miscellanies in Verse and Prose; by Thomas Chatterton (1778) as well as the books by Dr Jeremiah Milles and Jacob Bryant. In these (often amazing) Early Sources and Responses, the oddly ...”

“... claimed, then Barbara Guest was a devout classicist. No American poet – with the exception of John Ashbery – so reverently extended early modernist aesthetics into the second half of the 20th century. As Guest put it in her essay ‘Radical Poetics and Conservative Poetry’, ‘everything we loved, emulated, was attached to the lyric modernism of ...”

“... them. The only signs of fresh pictorial intelligence in the exhibition come from two Englishmen, John Michael Wright and John Riley, whose portraits presage the comic tones of the 18th century, and from the Flemish Jacob Huysmans. Huysmans, like Orazio Gentileschi before him, was a ...”

“... Cavendish himself and by four men who sailed with him, Antony Knivet, a young gentleman volunteer; John Davis, the great navigator; J. Jane, a friend of Davis’s; and Thomas Lodge the poet. Thomas Cavendish was a man of considerable estate but varying fortunes, and like many of his contemporaries he took to the sea to improve them: they were at their charming ...”

“... Queen’s Counsel. Still, as long as it’s men in wigs ... The real problem is the one to which John Griffith and others have repeatedly called attention: that the judiciary comes very largely from a tranche of society whose values, culture, données and attitudes are homogeneous because they are socially and educationally inbred. Less attention has perhaps ...”

“... of Linear Elamite. Afterwards, the keeper of the Middle East department at the British Museum, John Curtis, mentioned that he knew the Mahboubian family and could make an introduction. It took four years of cajoling but eventually the family agreed to withdraw the silver vessels from a safe deposit box for Desset to examine.Desset is adamant that without ...”

“... the piece was by the Polish composer Henryk Gorecki and the words were the personal motto Pope John Paul II had adopted, by which he expressed his intense love of Mary. The piece was composed in 1987 to celebrate the pope’s third visit to his native country and to the national shrine of Our Lady of Czestochowa. The association spoiled the pleasure the ...”

“... anyway. The loving old man on the left isn’t a Pharisee but Joseph’s adoring elderly father, Jacob; the sullen averted faces to the right aren’t intellectuals but his embittered older brothers, soon to attempt his murder in jealous rage. And the wonderfully intent boy at the centre has the face of a poet, not of God; he is dressed not in sanctity but ...”

“... comedie’. In similar fashion he began his earlier Discovery of the Fraudulent Practises of John Darrell (another exorcist, but a Protestant one this time) with the invocation: ‘open the curtaine, and see their Puppettes play.’ Harsnett’s point is that a ritual which seems to manifest supernatural power is no more than a play. Greenblatt’s ...”

“... honour of Orwell’s year are: Orwell Remembered by Audrey Coppard and Bernard Crick (Ariel, 287 pp., £3.95, 5 January, 0 563 20200 9), George Orwell: A Personal Memoir by T.R. Fyvel (Hutchinson, reissue, 221 pp., £4.95, October 1983, 0 09 151741 9), Unwelcome Guerrilla. George Orwell and the ‘New Statesman’: An ...”

“... spring of 1953, during the first ever visit by an American secretary of state to the Middle East, John Foster Dulles made a point of including Cairo on his itinerary. Eisenhower and Dulles wanted Egypt to meet the Europeans halfway, i.e. to settle for something less than full sovereignty; to give Russia the cold shoulder, i.e. to side with the West in the ...”

“... early modern equivalent of the yellow highlighter. According to the Jacobean educational writer John Brinsley, ‘the choycest books of most great learned men, and the notablest students’ were marked through, ‘with little lines under or above’ or ‘by some prickes, or whatsoever letter or mark may best help to call the knowledge of the thing to ...”

“... venue nicknamed the Therapeutic Theatre (its real name was the Stegreiftheater), run by Jacob Moreno, a former medical student who felt that theatre had lost its immediacy. Deeply of its time, the Therapeutic Theatre combined direct psychiatric therapy with the ‘ecstatic pathos of Expressionism’; Freud meets Strindberg, without the formal ...”

“... without it the oeuvre would be no more than the interesting record of a pained but minor artist. John Halperin, of course, takes a different view, claiming that a dozen of the novels are ‘first-rate’. In order to reach that total he has to include The Paying Guest – indeed, he thinks it a ‘masterpiece’. As it is a short book, about thirty thousand ...”

“... but even more so because its sensational image may encourage false, 20th-century expectations. But John Burrow will not mind. He writes to burst joy’s bubble upon the tongue. A Liberal Descent, like the works of 19th-century historical scholarship that it discusses, is written out of a tradition that respects personality (which is not at all the same thing ...”