“... George Ignatieff and his eldest brother had wanted to write the family history but one died quite young and the other was too busy. Their parents, Michael Ignatieff’s grandparents, wrote (unpublished) memoirs of their own lives, his a dry public document, hers a jumble of memories, written in English for her grandchildren to read. They died in ...”

“... was becoming increasingly irritated by her continued seclusion at Windsor, Osborne and Balmoral, a young, clever, radical MP named George Otto Trevelyan published a pamphlet which had the effrontery to ask: ‘What does she do with it?’ Where, Trevelyan wanted to know, was all the money going which the Queen was paid by the Government for the sole purpose of ...”

“... or nurture – the pelican (not the first in Rego’s work) pierces its breast to feed its young – but the dynamic is sexual. The girl and bird are posed at an angle. Jane’s eyes are closed and her mouth stretched wide; she is needy, greedy, pained or ecstatic, the embrace a nightmare of assault or a dream of sustenance, perhaps salvation. Jane is ...”

“... don’t speak any foreign languages, I don’t like foreigners,’ to which Churchill replied: ‘Young man, these all seem to me to be positive advantages.’ When Eden was dealing with the Indo-China crisis in Geneva, holding the French by one hand while holding off the hawkish Dulles with the other (‘The trouble with you, Foster,’ Eden told him, ‘is ...”

“... remained one of Evelyn’s friends for most of his life. He also enjoyed what was called, after Robert Boyle had popularised the term, ‘seraphick love’ with Anne Russell (whom he dubbed ‘Platona’) and Elizabeth Carey (who became his ‘Electra’). It is exceptionally hard to describe what Evelyn felt for these women: probably it is best to say that ...”

“... writers are in the exhibition: William Empson, Seamus Heaney, Charles Tomlinson, Salman Rushdie, Robert Lowell, Geoffrey Hill. The only other bare feet besides Walcott’s belong to a corpse on a dissecting table in front of Keith Simpson, the forensic pathologist. An illegible name-tag is attached to a big toe. St Lucia may not be the Isle of Man, but legs ...”

“... that helped the Khmer Rouge seize power, is not mentioned. When the foreign co-prosecutor, Robert Petit, a Canadian, suggested bringing more individuals to trial, his Cambodian co-prosecutor reportedly blocked him. In June Petit announced that he was resigning for ‘personal reasons’, but officials who follow the proceedings closely believe he was ...”

“... whether it is Ingres’s Apotheosis of Homer or the latest colour-mag line-up of the Best of Young British Novelists. Who’s new, who’s hot, who’s good, who’s not going to cut the mustard? The critical triage starts immediately. I remember lining up with my fellow Young Novelists of 1983, and after we had left ...”

“... the work of composition’. Initially at least, theatre wasn’t his main interest: the ambitious young provincial was determined to establish himself as a literary poet, for whom print and court patronage would be the key to success. Catering for the popular tastes of playhouse audiences was something he, like many of his playwright contemporaries, might ...”

“... of writers resist, or try to resist, the by now familiar and formulaic portrait of the artist as a young child: in Thomas’s case, intimidating, overbearing father, worshipped abject mother and sensitive child who only becomes the best version of himself in his writing. Thomas’s life as a boy was nearly half his life – he was killed at 39 – and Wilson ...”

“... what you’re going to say better than you understand it yourself’, Gilbert Ryle said of the young Bernard Williams, ‘and sees all the possible objections to it, all the possible answers to all the possible objections, before you’ve got to the end of your sentence’. Williams’s declared enemies in philosophy – ‘reactionaries’ who sweep ...”

“... generation. ‘I saw more fighting,’ he wrote, than Siegfried Sassoon, or Edmund Blunden, or Robert Graves, far more than Liddell Hart, four or five times as much as Wilfred Owen, and I didn’t go home with a nervous breakdown. [But] I fear the damage is done, and the myth of the 1930s has prevailed … When I meet some clever ...”

“... sea, air – gathered. Not long after his death in 1978, Zukofsky was taken up by a group of young writers who referred to themselves as the L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poets. The work of this group was always wrapped in self-justifying, crudely fashioned, post-structuralist commentary, and emphasised indeterminism, resistance to ...”

“... Exactly who she was, and whether she existed at all, no one is sure (two possible candidates are a young spy called Anne Marie Lesser, and Elsbeth Schragmuller, a former student at the University of Freiburg). In effect, the Lady Doctor was a blank page on which were inscribed all types of kinkiness. ‘The Frau Doktor, as she was addressed by her ...”

“... in the Megastore who ‘samples’ his signs of identity from its offerings, but as a young journalist-critic who needs to report on it. In 1985 Si Newhouse, the mogul of the Condé Nast media empire (Vogue, GQ, Vanity Fair), purchased the New Yorker from its founding family – to scatter some of its aura on his other publications, or so it was ...”