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“... down. The story of Hypatia has been told many times and it isn’t easy to cast new light on it. Edward Watts aims ‘to recognise the life she led as well as the death she suffered’. He tells her story following the conventions of modern biography, starting with her childhood, moving on to middle age, discussing her death, and concluding with two ...”

“... pretender, Perkin Warbeck, and removed the most dangerous alternative claimant to his throne, Edward, Earl of Warwick, the nephew of Edward IV in the male line. The king was poised to celebrate the marriage of his eldest son, Arthur, to the Spanish princess Katherine of Aragon. The splendid pageants and tournaments that ...”

“... historians and literary scholars alike, and a famous, albeit much criticised, article from 1992 by J.H. Fisher argued that the Lancastrian kings had a ‘language policy’. Vale argues that although the king had no ‘policy’ as such, he was certainly conscious of the meanings attached to different languages, and the use of English was a ‘deliberate ...”

“... a painter there, he paints a queer sort of pictures about God and Creation.” ’ The painter was Watts, and they had arrived at Little Holland House. This was a kind of manor farm in the middle of South Kensington, where Mrs Sarah Prinsep and her sisters held an unconventional salon every Sunday. Artists and philosophers lingered there, particularly during ...”

“... by Bernard Meyer; the impeccable edition of Conrad’s letters to Cunninghame Graham by C.T. Watts; certain key articles by Ian Watt – and this is not to mention the many critical works which incorporated biographical material, such as Eloise Knapp Hay’s The Political Novels of Joseph Conrad, and Edward Said’s ...”

“... Am I eccentric?’ Edward James once asked me in the days before I was added to his long list of enemies both real and imaginary. ‘I suppose I am, but I don’t mean to be. I’ve always tried to behave like everyone else.’ We were sitting on the platform of one of the inevitably incomplete concrete follies he was building at enormous expense on a hillside he owned by proxy in a Mexican jungle ...”

“... today know by heart? The best known Victorian poem is probably ‘Good King Wenceslas’ (by J.M. Neale), followed by ‘Once in royal David’s city’ (Mrs Alexander); ‘All things bright and beautiful’ (also Mrs Alexander) is less familiar than it used to be, but was once possibly the best known of all. The most famous American poem of the ...”

“... Gallery. Emily Tennyson had never liked the picture, perhaps in part because she also disliked Edward FitzGerald, who had originally commissioned it from Samuel Laurence. Earlier she had asked Watts to repaint it, but he refused, and during her husband’s lifetime she had not succeeded in finding another painter whom ...”

“... Christopher Logue who has compiled The Children’s Book of Comic Verse for Batsford, and Julia Watts in The Children’s Book of Funny Verse (Faber), have both grasped the essentials about a child’s sense of humour – far better than the 1935 editors of The Dragon Book of Verse where I first encountered ‘light verse’ and found it depressingly ...”

“... her age; they separated within ten months. Three years after that, she took up with the architect Edward William Godwin. They did not marry, but had a daughter and son together, and the expense of their upkeep drove her back to the stage. Her performance as Portia in The Merchant of Venice drew her to the attention of Henry Irving, an emerging actor-manager ...”

“... choked arabesques. The two arts are ‘interlaced’, to borrow a word from William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones: Interlacings, Caroline Arscott’s astonishing recent study of their relationship (Yale, £40, 2008). For every Rossetti formula femme fatale there is the true cloying proximity – stuffed with the smug reek of sex – of his Bocca Baciata or ...”

“... it did not get her into the usual reference books. She was the subject of a biography, in 1959, by Edward Grierson, Storm Bird: The Strange Life of Georgina Weldon, which Brian Thompson commends in his bibliography as ‘genial and entertaining’. His own book is as genial as the subject will allow, often extravagantly entertaining, and as shrewd as it is ...”

“... to the year’ (well, very nearly) with that of the Dowager Empress, and whose rambles with Watts-Dunton between Southwold and Dunwich had a sedative effect on the poet’s overwrought nerves. The thread breaks off with a visitor to The Pines, on Putney Hill, likening Swinburne to the silkworm, Bombyx mori, because of how he munched his way steadily ...”

“... then often still attributed to Giorgione, she refers to its possible influence on George Frederic Watts in the 1860s and Edward Burne-Jones in the 1870s. It also influenced Pater’s own fiction, as readers of Marius the Epicurean (1885) will appreciate: the young knight Cornelius tries on his armour ‘and as he gleamed ...”

“... Americans look like imbeciles. But, the first page: I wrote it twice, satisfactory neither time. J.G. Farrell – a Liverpool-born, Oxford-educated writer of Anglo-Irish descent – was living in New York when he wrote these words in his diary on 18 March 1967. He was 32 and had published three novels, A Man from Elsewhere (1963), The Lung (1965) and A Girl ...”