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“... as the Lucas van Leyden, a painting I find ravishing but can’t find much to say about, is John Sell Cotman’s Greta Bridge, a watercolour in the British Museum. I was brought up on Cotman, in that they have a very good collection of his work in Leeds, most of it bequeathed by Sidney Kitson, who was so fond of the artist he was said to suffer from ...”

“... years of Africa as I had months – almost After Casement’s arrest in 1916, Conrad wrote to John Quinn in New York: We never talked politics ... He was a good companion: but already in Africa I judged that he was a man, properly speaking, of no mind at all. I don’t mean stupid. I mean that he was all emotion. By emotional force (Congo ...”

“... on ‘The Mores of the Germans’ (as seen in Tacitus, Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Eduard Norden) leads one on to the Asiatic Society of Calcutta, Friedrich Schlegel, Indo-European linguistics and Ernest Gellner’s essay on Bronislaw Malinowski; then back to John Anderson – the 1938 ...”

“... doubleness ministers to social vigilance, not to solitary complacency. In The Figure of Echo, John Hollander has recently unfolded a contrariety in Chapter 26 of the Book of Proverbs: Answer not a tool according to his folly, lest thou also be like unto him. Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own conceit. Each of these ...”

“... influence on his early fiction, however, was Raymond Roussel, to whose work he was introduced by John Ashbery in 1956: Roussel’s ‘sovereign genius’, Mathews later declared, ‘demonstrated to me that psychology was a dispensable fashion, that the moral responsibilities of writing did not lie in a respect of subject matter, and that the writing of prose ...”

“... his ideas had to be judged ‘too hypothetical to afford entire satisfaction’. In 1821, Dugald Stewart gave a further twist to the tale by linking Leibniz with what he called ‘the continental philosophy’, suggesting that a habit of ‘deference to the authority of Leibniz’, combined with a short-sighted mistrust of honest ...”

“... Hearing the news on the Today programme this morning R. nearly cries. I met Bowie only once, at John Schlesinger’s sometime in the 1980s, and remember him as a slight, almost colourless figure, who was somehow Scots. M. calls later and recalls how someone he knew picked up Bowie when he was still David Jones. He offered to come round, bringing his guitar ...”

“... mainstream, the result would be an ‘explosion in the heart of the commodity’, as the late Mark Stewart put it, a disruption of the unthinking common sense of an affluent capitalist society. The sleepwalking masses would be jolted into an awareness of the true poverty of their lives, and into the political action necessary to change it.A variety of ...”

“... There is often a vacancy to his acting, which can give the illusion of mystery. The producer John Foreman recalled that Newman’s second wife, Joanne Woodward, once said to him: ‘If you think he’s thinking something, he’s not always thinking something.’In Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Newman hardly moves his eyes when he speaks – only his mouth. We ...”

“... of the most striking examples described by Professor Wernham was the naval expedition led by Sir John Norris and Sir Francis Drake in 1589. If they had obeyed the Queen’s instructions and sailed to Santander and San Sebastian, he believes they would probably have been able to destroy the battered half of the Armada which was sheltering and re-equipping in ...”

“... was homosexual.’ Thirty years later, when Eliot’s prestige and influence were at their zenith, John Peter, a Canadian academic, published an article in Essays in Criticism called ‘A New Interpretation of The Waste Land’. Peter argued that the poem was at heart an elegy that might be compared to Tennyson’s In Memoriam: ‘At some previous time the ...”

“... female and male, from Margaret Tudor and the Virgin Mary to the celebrated diplomat Bernard Stewart. The dextrous harmonising of gender roles in the London poem isn’t typical of his later work, but it is entirely fitting for a piece written within the context of marital negotiations, especially by a young and attention-seeking poet. Dunbar is the ...”

“... US’s Cold War interests. The former CIA agent Miles Copeland – father of the Police drummer, Stewart Copeland – was employed by Booz Allen fresh after instigating coups in Syria and Iran. In 1953, he was sent to Egypt on assignment from both his former and current employers. His Booz Allen consulting work involved tracing the complex holdings of the ...”

“... Russell’s reputation was made by his brilliant defence of the Irish Nationalist MP Charles Stewart Parnell before the Special Commission set up after publication in the Times of what we now know as the Pigott forgeries. (These were documents which quite wrongly linked Parnell to the murder in 1882 of two leading members of the British Administration in ...”

“... An arthritic Chuck Berry on TotP, slobbering the playground snigger of ‘My Ding-a-Ling’? Rod Stewart jiggling his satiny wee buttocks like some bored old burlesque artist? Any of this doing it for you, kids? The backroom intimacy spotlit by Mapplethorpe and Smith looked deeply subversive, but had none of the usual tawdry appliqué of ‘erotica’: its ...”