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“... the fact that Matthew and Mark record the last words of Jesus as spoken in Aramaic, while Luke and John offer a different version, in Greek. But although Mark, followed by Matthew, offers various sayings in Aramaic he immediately translates them into Greek. The evangelists were addressing not only Gentiles but the large number of Jews whose ordinary language ...”

“... Tieck, who coined the phrase ‘romantic irony’ for the artistic apprehension of human duality; John Paul Richter, who invented the term ‘doppelgänger’; Schlegel, for whom, as for Coleridge, Shakespeare was a Proteus, and who wrote that dualism ‘is rooted so deeply in our consciousness that even when we are, or at least think ourselves, alone, we ...”

“... selling paintings of rural and woodland landscapes to pent-up urbanites. The gallery, now owned by John Driscoll, moved downtown in 2012 from its stodgier precincts on 57th Street. Unlike the Whitney, which, in its choice of what to exhibit, sometimes seems to have jettisoned most of its pre-1960 holdings in the course of its downtown journey, the Driscoll ...”

“... Pilgrim Edition of Dickens’s letters, was launched in the optimistic Sixties (the late John Butt was associated with both initiatives). As in previous volumes, about half the letters (here they number 247) are hitherto unpublished, and of the rest many are now published for the first time in their full form. There are the inevitable routine and ...”

“... transfigure reality, not to reflect it – which is why, from the heretical medieval philosopher John Scottus Eriugena to Bishop Berkeley and W.B. Yeats, there is such a robust Irish faith in the imagination’s power to summon new worlds into existence. Philosophically, this suspicion of realism went hand in hand with a rejection of rationalism and ...”

“... be by, as well as partly about, women. Ms Peters may be right in surmising that the £200-a-week Irving paid Ellen Terry in the Nineties ‘probably made her, with the exception of the Queen, England’s highest-paid woman’, but my guess is that, if there is a contestant, she was a novelist. Marie Corelli, for instance, is estimated (in Eileen Bigland’s ...”

“... wants to win the Nobel Prize ... Roth. Roth is just a fuckin’ masturbator, a wanker, man, in the john, whackin’ off. There is a disquisition on Shylock himself. There is a long salt-cod-rabbinical ramble, as told by a Mossad agent, on why Jews must never commit loshon hora – viz. the telling of cruel stories against themselves. Much of the material Roth ...”

“... history of the screenplay is complicated, and it seems clear that Orson Welles, Mankiewicz and John Houseman all had a hand in it. Mankiewicz signed a contract that meant he would receive payment for his work but not get a credit; later, he managed to get his name, along with Welles’s, on screen. The film’s single Oscar went to both of them. They had ...”

“... history. The chapter on CIA infiltration of the art world is riddled with howlers (that John Hay Whitney had his ‘own’ museum is one among several mistakes of this sort), but the gist of her argument about Abstract Expressionism and its uses as propaganda is correct, if not wholly original. Who Paid the Piper? is even so a major work of ...”

“... That would confirm the bitch plot. Still, we’re not going to find out. It’s good to learn that John Huston was one of the screenwriters, adapting a play by Owen Davis. Two other great if overwrought films allow us to see a little more of the range as well as the consistency of what the Davis character is up to. They are Now, Voyager (1942) and Dark ...”

“... When Irving Sandler​ asked Joan Mitchell what she felt about the word ‘nature’, she didn’t mince her words: ‘I hate it. It reminds me of some Nature-Lover Going Out Bird-Watching.’ It was 1957 and Sandler was interviewing Mitchell in her fourth-floor walk-up on the Lower East Side. Mitchell’s gestural paintings were admired for their glowing abstraction, suggestive of landscapes, but she was reluctant to let clichés about the natural world attach themselves to her work ...”

“... over for the last forty years of his life and failed to finish. When his literary executor John Callahan appended some of these jottings to the end of ‘Juneteenth’, the ‘novel’ he extracted from two thousand manuscript pages, he gave Ellison the last word: the final note reproaches the editor from beyond the grave, along with the readers ...”

“... of his father, whose waiting-room was constantly crowded with supplicants for his services. As John Juxon suggests, the elder Lewis could have served as a model for the abrasive Mr Jaggers in Great Expectations, who suspended his moral judgment when dealing with his greasy, grimy riffraff of clients – cracksmen, fences, thieves – and then, in ...”

“... of a letter from Nathan Zuckerman. It begins: ‘I’ve read your manuscript twice’ (echoes of Irving Howe’s ‘the cruellest thing anyone can do with Portnoy’s Complaint is to read it twice’). Zuckerman strongly advises against publication. Fact, Zuckerman notes, is not Roth’s strong suit. It makes him too nice! ‘Kind, discreet, careful ...”

“... His wife Jane had other tastes, preferring the dashing and magnificent physical bravura of Edward Irving. Virginia Surtees has done a delicate and admirable job of investigating her life, and his, in terms of their external relations and dream commitments. Carlyle’s infatuation with Harriet Baring has something touching about it and exemplifies a romantic ...”