“... that brought Abraham Lincoln to the White House. It wasn’t much of a conversation though, more an exercise in mutual incomprehension and loathing, with entirely different campaigns being fought in the North and the South (where for the most part Lincoln wasn’t even on the ballot). Dewey died in the summer of 1952, so the last election he was able to ...”

“... the idea of some connection between the underlying seismic forces and the behaviour of its more unhinged inhabitants. ‘Think of what the place has been through,’ Fraser urges the reader in her slightly sonorous style. ‘Burning, then freezing. Consider its proclivities: abusive and abused.’ We learn about the OWL: the Olympic-Wallowa ...”

“... the two of them joking back and forth, when Berryman volunteered that he ‘hated the name Mabel more than any other female name’. Anne decided Henry was the name she found ‘unbearable’. For a long time afterwards, ‘in the most cosy and affectionate lover kind of talk … she was Mabel and I was Henry.’ Not long after that Berryman began to write ...”

“... had no representation). That same summer George IV died, leaving the throne to his marginally more stable brother William. The death of the king brought a general election, and the Tories were replaced by the Whigs. The chief difference between the two parties was that the Whigs were more sensitive to the growing wrath ...”

“... father’s side, were schoolmasters or Anglican clergymen. Whitehead’s own father was both. The Thomas Whitehead to whom the quatrain was attributed took over a derelict school called Chatham House in Ramsgate in 1810 and within ten years, according to Professor Lowe, ‘made it one of the best schools in England’. I do not know what led Lowe to believe ...”

“... begins by being about the mannequins, or lay figures, that artists often used as technical aids. More pliable, and more patient, than live models, many of them were also compelling and strange. A primitive lay figure once owned by Walter Sickert is stretched out on a sheet in a large cardboard coffin; it’s as though ...”

“... against Terror, which they painted in Morelia, Mexico in 1934.The third frame, which was not more than implied at the time San Clemente was painted, is that of American post-abstract figuration: not the cool, ironic Pop art figuration of Lichtenstein or Rosenquist, but the raw, scrawled attacks on pictorial propriety of, say, Schnabel and Basquiat, whose ...”

“... proverb is right, the translation I have just offered of the proverb itself must be just one more betrayal. Indeed, the case against me is strong. The Italian phrase gets much of its force from the jingling assonance of the two words, but one finds swiftly that it is no good trying to reproduce this with the weaker assonances available in ...”

“... reflections on the state and status of his subject illustrate the Coleridgean maxim that a man is more likely to be right in what he affirms than in what he denies. Arising from lectures delivered, one imagines, off the cuff to an audience at the University of Michigan, they consist for the most part of soundings-off against a rogues’ gallery of ideological ...”

“... fiction, and certainly for anyone interested in 18th-century literature, there could scarcely be a more significant book. Yet the novel that burst on the world in 1740 is almost entirely unknown. This new Oxford edition of Pamela is the first British one ever to return to Richardson’s original. In America, Richardson’s biographers Duncan Eaves and Ben ...”

“... of a printed text in Greek, but it is unmistakably clear that the decision to include it was made more or less at the last, certainly with the full support of his publisher, Johann Froben, who may well have sponsored the idea. Four hundred and fifty years later, the Greek text and Latin translation have been relegated alike to the archives of humanist ...”

“... this retail unit could be yours in just seven days’ time. As you got closer to town there were more jacket potato and sandwich shops (at Fatso’s Filling Station a sandwich, crisps and drink was £2.49), pawnbrokers and gambling shops. At the end there’s a covered shopping centre with Boots, a Vodafone shop, Starbucks: you finally come into a ...”

“... Manteo and Wanchese, two men from what is now North Carolina, worked with Raleigh’s navigator Thomas Hariot to devise an Algonquian alphabet to learn about America’s ‘singuler great comodities’. Between 1550 and 1800 the Americas were the source of 80 per cent of the world’s silver and 70 per cent of its gold, although as Raleigh and his ...”

“... piffle’. Who’s to tell how few of them, or how many hundreds of thousands more, have ever heard the piece from start to finish? The question would not interest the city editors, but as a rhetorical device has long been popular with the cultural authorities. If in the homelands of the Austro-German symphony a ...”

“... revenge for the Franco-Prussian War. The Boulez-Chéreau Ring has also been described, more preposterously, as ‘the Ring of the century’ – an accolade which plainly belongs to the 1951 Wieland Wagner production which inaugurated the ‘New Bayreuth’. Musically, the Boulez Ring cannot compare with Furtwängler’s La Scala performance or ...”