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“... them and the Empire is no more. Empire follows Art and not vice versa as Englishmen suppose. William Blake, ‘Annotations to Reynolds’ Blake’s famous remark in the margins of Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses on Art has always mystified me. How could Blake, the fierce ‘prophet against empire’, name his own beloved vocation of ‘Art and ...”

“... The Life and Letters volume reprints the first biography, by his masterly literary executor William Frederic Badé. The narrative is laced with Muir’s letters, which rival Lawrence’s in the wholeheartedness of their responses to life around him and to his correspondents. In them we see a man at one with himself and with the granite, the fast ...”

“... rights.’ The dramatisation of Keller’s story, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Miracle Worker by William Gibson, has not a trace of these concerns. I discovered that you can find many of her political speeches in a rare volume published by a radical press, but a 1998 book about Keller’s public speaking, which does include three political lectures, conveys ...”

“... 1848 and 1912 Rossetti was, in Whistler’s phrase, ‘a king’. And his imperium was very broad. It encompassed the leading intellectuals of the period as well as a popular audience created and nourished by many cultural entrepreneurs. As with Walter Scott and so many others, that success and influence would eventually count against ...”

“... Ralph Rumney took up his camera and stalked Alan Ansen, Beat poet, paedophile and intimate of William Burroughs, publishing the finished product as a systematic collage called A Psychogeographic Map of Venice. More often than not, however, the city meant Paris. Like Benjamin, the Surrealists or indeed Baudelaire, the Situationists saw Paris as a topos ...”

“... of the games of unintended consequences in which we are always and inevitably caught up. But this broad theme is not enough to prevent The New Leviathan from meandering and marking time, and Collingwood’s decision to cast himself as a second Hobbes, together with his hideous method of numbering all his propositions, only showed up his loss of literary ...”

“... with factual errors, is hopelessly uncritical, and largely derives from the work of writers like William Blisset and Herbert Knust. I would have added John DiGaetani’s Richard Wagner and the Modern British Novel, which was published four years earlier, but Martin claims that a book of that title ‘by Bernard di Gaetani’ was ‘under preparation at the ...”

“... and capital exports; a variety of job-creation and work-sharing schemes; and price controls. In broad outline much of this occurs in Mr Shore’s chapter. What he does not go into is the anticipated effects of such a combination of measures. Desai points out that various policy packages along the lines of the Alternative Economic Policy are estimated to be ...”

“... so acceptable and ‘the ritualistic excesses of some of his episcopate’ intolerable. There is a broad subject here for future inquiry. Meanwhile Mr Fletcher performs a timely service by reminding us that ‘there is a real sense in which the English Civil War was a war of religion.’ Impressed by the political articulacy of the petitions on both sides, Mr ...”

“... incautious and entire. Her flesh was the texture of plant life, and beneath it one sensed a frame, broad, porous and sleep-worn, as if sleep were a decay fishing her beneath the visible surface. About her head there was an effulgence as of phosphorus glowing about the circumference of a body of water – as if her life lay through her in ungainly luminous ...”

“... Wizard of the North and the rich Laird of Abbotsford, graced with titles (baronet and sheriff), broad acres and his own baronial hall. Success is the central theme of John Sutherland’s book too. But step by step he unwraps Lockhart’s packaging, beginning with the anecdotes. Too many couldn’t have occurred at the date specified: Sutherland refers drily ...”

“... He had inherited a family tradition of populist politics suffused with unabashed religiosity. William Wedgwood Benn had started as a Congregationalist and a Liberal: at 28 the youngest MP in the 1906 Parliament (whereas his own father had had to wait for a seat until he was 42). ‘Now Anthony has been chosen at the age of 25, so the family seems to be ...”

“... intervention would compromise at one stroke the careful edifice of peace campaigns and ‘broad fronts’ through which the Party had ingratiatingly tried, with some success, to keep in with the Labour Left and the trade-union apparat. I used to read the Morning Star (which had changed its name from the Daily Worker to become, as one comrade put it, a ...”

“... by without a murder as they rode high and free on their motorbikes shooting from the pillion in broad daylight. Then strangely, after ten months or so, the army came and arrested some of them, whereupon the owner of the lottery was himself assassinated, then his wife and son as well. Nobody came forward to denounce the paramilitaries, and they were ...”

“... specific to the latecomer. And it’s not clear that the implacable deafness is pathological. William Gibson said the future is already with us, it’s just not very evenly distributed: someone who indefatigably comes to your house when you have crawled away in exhaustion is a social monstrosity but also, quite possibly, simply caught in a wrinkle in ...”