“... to ‘behaviour’ and strong on obedience. Proprietary dog-food, appealingly humanised – James Spratt’s ‘Meal Fibrine Dog Cakes’, for example – was added to the household’s grocery-list. No longer just a man’s best friend or a lady’s toy, the dog was a member of the family. And if dogs were the children who never grew up, they also ...”

“... account of the new regime which now took shape insists that it was the Queen herself (and William Cecil) who in its very early days proved capable of boldly decisive action. (But by that very token, surely it was Paulet, the Marquess of Winchester, not Cecil, who said that he was sprung of the willow rather than the oak, ‘ortus sum ex salice, non ex ...”

“... world could know itself. He was, if reluctantly, an adornment to the Prussian court of Frederick William IV, and a willing favourite of Queen Victoria. Innumerable biographies of all sizes have been published since his death, and his life is legendary though not unduly eventful. Now we have it in the kind of detail few need. Larry Todd’s book, in the ...”

“... roller-skating than to art (it is hung, somewhat lazily, with a few giant works such as F-111 by James Rosenquist), but it will be divided up for future shows. It is on the fifth floor that Taniguchi scales the architecture down, proportions the galleries nicely, and allows the collection of the Painting and Sculpture Department (P&S) to take over. The ...”

“... on the story’s ideological bent. In 1993, a book called The Ghost in the Little House by William Holtz was published, claiming that a close study of the manuscripts of the novels revealed them to have been ghostwritten by Rose Wilder Lane, not only Laura Ingalls Wilder’s daughter, but a novelist, too. ‘Holtz’s book,’ Spufford ...”

“... to think tanks. Leading the rightist rising were the conservative intellectuals in the orbit of William F. Buckley’s National Review and the zealous campus activists of Young Americans for Freedom (a group ultimately larger and far more influential than the much celebrated leftist Students for a Democratic Society), as well as members of the staunchly ...”

“... wine, Lacryma Christi. The experience brought out something reckless in even the most serious. William Hamilton, who did more than anyone to further vulcanology as an academic study, made the ascent during the 1767 eruption in the company of the art historian Johann Winckelmann. They were travelling with the Prussian ambassador to Vienna, who had written a ...”

“... to do, and where could they go from here? ‘Supervisors at the IRS’s regional complex in Lake James township are trying to determine why no one noticed that one of their employees had been sitting dead at his desk for four days before anyone asked if he was feeling all right.’ Perhaps Wallace was writing toward paradise, where the forms are also ...”

“... to give them extra zest’, while the Man Group is an investment management business, though the James Man who founded the original company was an 18th-century barrel-maker (his firm supplied the navy with rum for almost two hundred years). Touches such as Elysian’s ‘Giraffe carrot’, so large that a single specimen can fill a vegetable dish for Sunday ...”

“... the celebrated ‘St Michan’s mummies’, 60 years ago, I already knew of the church from M.R. James, whose tales of supernatural terror entirely possessed my nine-year-old imagination. We entered the crypt, and it was as though my schoolfellows and I had stumbled into the pages of ‘The Treasure of Abbot Thomas’, ‘Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook’ or ...”

“... a literary brilliance’, Pacino writes, and introduced him to many writers, such as William Carlos Williams. This was the late 1950s, and Pacino says he would often go to an automat with a book and make a single cup of coffee last for hours. Laughton also encouraged him in his Shakespearean ambitions: Pacino’s audition piece was ‘O, what a ...”

“... James Schuyler​ gave his first public reading on 15 November 1988. People queued around the block to get a seat, and at the end he received the longest, most unconsciously glad applause Eileen Myles had ever heard in New York. ‘As for my moment in the spotlight,’ Schuyler reported to a friend a couple of days later, ‘well, truth to tell, I was a fucking sensation ...”

“... Government in 1972 Vanguard’s massed ranks lined up and fell in infantry-style to be reviewed by William Craig, masquerading as a latter-day Carson. In the North of Ireland, it is better not to throw stones: many political houses are made of glass. The North is, unhappily, a special case: were it not, there would have been no need to arm the police, to build ...”

“... book is high. Hellman is not the only snotty famous person to fall under her jaded eye. James Taylor and Carly Simon, Hellman’s guests one sunny afternoon, ‘smile stiffly’ at Mahoney when she brings coffee in on a serving tray, but otherwise ignore her. Mike Nichols and John Hersey win grudging approval – the former for giving her a nice ...”

“... state during the Boer War. Influenced by the very Englishly expressed Victorian socialism of William Morris, H.M. Hyndman and Robert Blatchford, the cause had been taken up and redirected by G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc in the first decade of the 20th century. It had been resumed in the 1920s by various other figures, including H.J. Massingham, a ...”