“... plays on the stage in the 1940s and 1950s; 12 years in the case of his latest and best biographer, John Lahr; or even as little as six weeks by me while reading Lahr’s absorbing Life, along with the work, and a big chunk of all the stuff Williams wrote and said about the work – is to learn and relearn how soberly Williams was speaking when he told ...”

“... of a German-controlled Europe made such detachment harder to sustain. As the liberal historian John Thompson shows in A Sense of Power, it was neither the threat that the Germans and Japanese posed to the US mainland that drove the country into the war, nor the imperative to secure international markets, since the US economy in the 1940s was overwhelmingly ...”

“... out into the green and pleasant suburbs. All of this changed over the following two decades.As John Davis points out, the idea that London started to ‘swing’ in the 1960s was largely the concoction of journalists in need of a story, most of them American. But in Soho and on the King’s Road in Chelsea, ideas were taking shape that would eventually ...”

“... modern jest book, which ascribed jokes and smart sayings to well-known figures such as the poet John Skelton or the fool Richard Tarleton. Jest-book-style anecdotes were often transcribed alongside more serious quotations in manuscript notebooks compiled by individual readers. So in 1601, the lawyer John Manningham ...”

“... were named after him and he was the recipient of mandatory encomia on official occasions. John Lewis Gaddis’s biography is a tombstone-sized tribute, based on unlimited access to its subject and his papers. Not bad for a mid-level policy planner whose most senior diplomatic postings were a brief ambassadorial appointment to Belgrade and an even ...”

“... interests confined to Shakespeare: among those the countess patronised were James Thomson, John Gay and George Frideric Handel (of whom she painted a portrait), all of them occasional guests at the Ashley-Cooper family seat, St Giles House, at Wimborne St Giles in Dorset.My interest was much piqued by the fact that I knew the Wimborne St Giles ...”

“... quality – a little like Weegee’s – at once random and composed. In one, the circus director John Ringling North dominates the right half of the frame, shouting instructions to an unseen person, while above and to the left a high-wire act has two showgirls suspended from the wheels of a bicycle: the picture frame is ...”

“... in insurance; wife and daughter; quiet life in Hartford, Connecticut; never travelled outside North America; the usual run of prizes towards the end of his life. I’ve never felt the need for a biography. And now that I’ve read this one by Mariani, a serial biographer of poets (he has notched already, among Americans, Williams, Crane, Lowell and ...”

“... clashing title turns out to be part of the point. The novel is set in a small French town in the north, towards Belgium; the time must be the late 1930s. The original Krull, Cornelius, was German, but has spent four-fifths of his life in France, and became naturalised before the First World War; he still barely speaks French and is losing his German. A ...”

“... or Iggy Pop’s The Idiot? Kraftwerk have a track called ‘Numbers’, but I prefer Soft Cell’s John Rechy-inspired single of the same name, one of the great lost 45s of the 1980s, which involves an entirely other (and far less hygienic) form of accounting. And I haven’t even mentioned that other great pre-techno German dance classic, ‘I Feel Love’ by ...”

“... of how Sun Myung Moon (his American name – real name, Young Myung Mun), from his origins as a North Korean peasant, has built a politico-religious empire with an annual revenue of over half a billion dollars (making it one of the world’s largest 50 private corporations). The young Moon seems to have been an ordinary enough peasant child until, at ...”

“... ones (not many of them improvements on the old) have taken their place. Most towns in Europe and North America are now served by only one newspaper, emphasising a trend towards monopoly of newspaper ownership and, with it, a return to the age of tycoon proprietorship which had begun to decline after the war. Most countries have seen a drop in newspaper ...”

“... to return to rural Georgia after around five years spent pursuing a career as a writer in the North. The parallel is one of the many in-jokes in O’Connor’s fiction. Like Asbury, O’Connor found herself desperately ill on a train journey south. Initially it was thought she was suffering from rheumatoid arthritis, but tests in February 1951 revealed ...”

“... in Morocco – timed to coincide with military uprisings across Spain – but was now stuck in North Africa and unable to get his army across to the mainland. Would Hitler provide transport planes, they asked, along with rifles and anti-aircraft guns? After criticising Franco for his funding problem (‘That’s no way to start a war!’), the Nazi leader ...”

“... and, by implication, to ideas.In Naples, Antonello would have been exposed to other artists from north of the Alps. The angular, almost abstract quality of some of his early works – including the Virgin and Child with a Franciscan Donor, the Virgin Reading (a work not accepted as autograph by all scholars) and the Portrait of a Man, now in Pavia – has ...”