“... 4 of A Human Document into a visual and verbal meditation on 9/11. Phillips glues in a postcard of King Kong clutching the World Trade Center, and a version of Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Children, and obscures all but 17 words from Mallock’s prose: ‘pasted on to the present/see, it is nine/eleven/the time singular/which broke down illusion.’ This ...”

“... of the information that War and Peace contains. Even novels in which almost nothing happens – John McGahern’s, for instance – will speak in historical whispers, aiming to ‘disimprison’, as Coleridge once said, ‘the soul of fact’. Beryl Bainbridge was one of the last of the pre-Google English novelists, the last, you might say, following ...”

“... Yeats was prematurely describing her as a woman stricken with age, she had a delirious affair with John Quinn, the American lawyer who was the great, almost indispensable, patron of the Yeats family. Foster, noting that her son, Robert, unlike Sir William, was short, allows himself (hiding the news in a note at the back of his huge book) to report local gossip ...”

“... with rather juvenile insults to religion – the Virgin was a whore, Christ was a bastard and St John was his bedfellow, and so on. It seems that one somehow needed to publicise the outrageousness of one’s heretical opinions by talking in this manner. And indeed the most curious aspect of blasphemy and profanity in general is this apparent need. What use ...”

“... qui prend la vie comme un collégien en vacances’. It was a lyrical elegy, comparing Greene to King Arthur in search of the Grail, a high-class Don Giovanni, the bizarre trio of Epicurus, Rabelais and Saint John the Baptist, as well as Chesterton, Mao Zedong, Maurice Barrès and Victor Hugo. In this orgy of comparisons ...”

“... in 295 BCE, and about Lucretia, whose rape and suicide incited the Romans to overthrow the last king of Rome. The dramas that were closer to what we think of as tragedy – the fabulae crepidatae (‘dramas using tragic footwear’) or tragoediae – were, like their Athenian precursors, based on mythological topics. The early Roman playwrights often ...”

“... feminist and other good causes. Yet claims of this kind can distort the fiction itself. When Mrs John Dashwood, at the beginning of the novel, rudely asserts her right to the succession of the Dashwood property, and persuades her husband to drop his plan to give £7000 to the dispossessed girls, the method by which she achieves her purpose has more to do ...”

“... which appeared in early 1959 only two months after the Hanover show, the artist and critic John McHale alludes to Rudolf Arnheim, who first applied Gestalt theory to art, and cites Paul Schilder on the ‘fragmentary associations’ that we fold into our body images. Similar reflections on the infantile development of the corporeal imago had been made ...”

“... was ascribed to Satan. In the first systematic treatise devoted to the topic, published in 1637, John Sym, a Puritan, was still able to attribute suicide to ‘the strong impulse, powerfull motions, and command of the Devill’. But natural causes were increasingly being blamed: melancholy, a dysfunction of the hypochondriac organs, folly, a foul ...”

“... a tribune’s sister (Clodia Metelli), an emperor’s mother-in-law (Faustina I), a king’s daughter (Arsinoe) and, with some double counting, no fewer than eight politicians’ wives. Galla Placidia, the last empress of the western Roman Empire, was the daughter of one emperor, mother of another, aunt of a third, sister of two more and married ...”

“... of the American police in the late 1990s. It is striking how closely his story resonates with John Kani’s account of being arrested after a rehearsal of Othello in apartheid Johannesburg in 1987 and interrogated about his onstage relationship with Joanna Weinberg’s Desdemona.If there is an intellectual faultline in Little’s collection, it is between ...”

“... was designed to be sent with an ‘enclosed message of sympathy from their Gracious Majesties the King and Queen’. The message’s wording was chosen by Rudyard Kipling and the secretary of state for war, Lord Derby. Kipling wanted to use a form letter with blank spaces, allowing for what he termed ‘M. S. interpolation’, but the proposal was vetoed by ...”

“... classes would soon have to live without. Six or seven years ago, only Alfred Jarry’s immortal King Ubu could have entertained the idea of the Polish State Symphony Orchestra touring 13 English towns and cities with a programme featuring a slow-motion 50-minute ‘symphony’ by a dissident composer whose name was unknown outside his native Poland. In that ...”

“... attack’, and by preferring, of the various accounts of Christian given by the survivor John Adams on Pitcairn, the one which is unfavourable. Christian’s Pitcairn was, of course, no more a paradise than Bligh’s Bounty. There were Tahitian women on Pitcairn, but not enough of them, and the results were another, bloodier mutiny and Christian’s ...”

“... with a naturalistic account of sex and sexual pleasure that there was in France. The radical John Wilkes’s venture into sexual literature is so marginal that it doesn’t figure here at all; the conflation of liberty and libertinage in Don Giovanni’s famous aria would have fallen on uncomprehending ears. We do not quite know, as Porter and Hall point ...”