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“... But diminished supply isn’t the whole story. In fact, as we are reminded in Rogues’ Gallery, Philip Hook’s survey of prominent art dealers from the Renaissance to today, the equivalents of de Pury’s ‘overlords’ and ‘titans’ were keen purchasers of very expensive contemporary art in the 19th century, when there was no shortage of Old ...”

“... something.’ The author in The New York Trilogy saw a girl at Grand Central Station reading his hook and quizzed her about it. Her response made him think of punching her in the face: ‘It’s no big deal. It’s just a book.’ Sachs speaks with the same levity of his own work (‘It’s only a novel’), and rebukes his earlier stuff as ‘too ...”

“... painter to the electors of Saxony. He was close to members of the faculty of the university – Philip Melanchthon was one. Cupid Complaining to Venus relates to a Greek verse Melanchthon used as the basis for Latin moralities. Contemporaries would have registered that the roebuck, which laps water in the foreground of Adam and Eve, was famously faithful ...”

“... two children. His sole surviving daughter, Frances, married the poet and Protestant courtier Sir Philip Sidney. Cooper acknowledges the problems these gaps in the record pose to a biographer, but doesn’t shy away from sifting Walsingham’s motives and gauging the nature and depth of his religious beliefs. For Cooper, Walsingham is a man of principle ...”

“... of a man whose wife (he thinks) has committed suicide. ‘Canst thou draw out leviathan with a hook?’ the priest asks, ‘or his tongue with a cord which thou lettest down?’ The words he doesn’t cite, at least in the subtitles, are even more appropriate: ‘Will he make many supplications unto thee? Will he speak soft words unto thee?’ The priest ...”

“... sets the story rolling, and those of Dr Evans (her physician, a man for the heroic intervention), Philip Watts (star diagnostician, properly modest on medicine’s behalf when faced with the body’s rebellions) and Mimi Franklin (paid volunteer, divorced, with a housing problem) come as neatly as commercial breaks. Interest does not flag and the medical ...”

“... Wars. His first four novels, which explored and extended the bounds of sci-fi, owe a large debt to Philip K. Dick. Lethem even sold the author’s estate ‘a few dozen’ paperback copies of out-of-print titles they didn’t have, so that the executor could seek their republication. ‘Vulcan’s Hammer, in other words, is sort of my fault,’ Lethem once ...”

“... Philip Larkin met Monica Jones in 1946 at Leicester University College. She was an assistant lecturer there, and Larkin was an assistant librarian. Both had firsts in English from Oxford. Monica Jones was an able lecturer, but she never published anything and so was never promoted, although she stayed at Leicester until she retired in 1981 ...”

“... peace and a new life. But as he comes out of prison, the girl he likes dumps him and he’s on the hook for one more job. Huston saw him older, with greying hair and a kind of sadness. An edge of pathos touched Earle, and Bogart began to feel better about himself. His character in the film had two friends, a small dog and Ida Lupino (she had top billing on the ...”

“... Barnes later said that she loved her grandmother Zadel ‘as a child usually loves its mother’, Philip Herring quotes letters to her from Zadel which say things like ‘Pink Tops are simply gasping with love!’ (‘Pink Tops’ are Zadel’s breasts) and feature cartoons of naked women on top of one another. He also claims that Barnes may have been raped ...”

“... to think perhaps you worked in bed, like Marcel Proust,’ a waiting femme fatale says when Philip Marlowe hits his office in The Big Sleep (1939). Marlowe’s response: ‘Who’s he?’ ‘A French writer,’ she says, ‘a connoisseur in degenerates. You wouldn’t know him.’ She couldn’t have said the same to Philo Vance, S.S. Van Dine’s ...”

“... and adventure. ‘I’m youth, I’m joy,’ he crowed to his enemy, the wicked, unloved Captain Hook. Hook and his pirates were the only adults on the island. Peter and his band of Lost Boys killed them all. But they never discussed fathers. Mothers, he told Wendy, were not to be trusted. When Jane Fonda told Michael ...”

“... literary scene were anti-Stalinist socialists who defended Trotsky. In 1937 William Philips and Philip Rahv had revived Partisan Review as a left-wing anti-Stalinist literary journal. The Committee for Cultural Freedom was founded in 1939 by the philosophers John Dewey and Sidney Hook with a similar programme. Lionel ...”

“... Like the best of the ‘Eastern’ poets, or the poets of ‘the other Europe’ (Al Alvarez and Philip Roth) or ‘the poets of survival’ (Daniel Weissbort), Lleshanaku is material, then metaphorical, then material again: The search for unknown words is a complete failure. They have all been discovered. They are round and soft, without mystery little ...”

“... godfathers make in the movies before the sudden roar of laughter which takes the underling off the hook. Or maybe Aretino really would have liked a little more attention paid to his finery – including the gold chain he had from the King of France. Or then again, as a note here suggests, he may have been taking care of his ‘delicate relationship’ with ...”