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“... life from his literary output: fact and fiction repeatedly inform each other. He told Charles Scribner II, his publisher, that his next novel, The Beautiful and Damned (1922), concerned ‘the life of one Anthony Patch between his 25th and 33rd years. He is one of those many with the tastes and weaknesses of an artist but with no actual creative ...”

“... Banti’s presence in the narrative is at the heart – is the heart – of the novel. In another passage, Banti is imagining the notorious drama of Artemisia’s adolescence, when she was already an artist of startlingly large accomplishment: her rape in 1611 by a painter colleague of her eminent father; the decision to take the rapist to court; the ...”

“... women whose bodies have an enviable integrity and a fleshy, non-replicative beauty that razzes Charles Darwin.’ For Greer these are ‘failed women’, ‘spurious females’, and the chapter of The Whole Woman in which they appear, along with mainly male-to-female transsexuals, has the title ‘Pantomime Dames’. We might pause at that ...”

“... of non-co-operation. Dorothy Comingore (now mostly remembered for her part as the second wife of Charles Foster Kane) had been disgusted by the friendly testimony of her ex-husband, Richard Collins. ‘So,’ she said, ‘I went out and had my hair shaved off.’ Comingore joined the picket line outside the HUAC sessions in Los Angeles, appeared as an ...”

“... is the first of the suite Embryons desséchés (at the top of the score there’s a short passage telling you what a holothurie is – ‘ignorant people call them sea cucumbers’). It begins with a simple semiquaver figure in the left hand; ‘It is raining,’ the score says, and Satie adds in a plangent descending figure in thirds in the right ...”

“... most fashionable of environmental causes. There were international petitions and boycotts; Prince Charles and Al Gore were outspoken in their support. The campaign pivoted around the figure of Manser, the ‘Wild Man of Borneo’ or ‘Swiss Tarzan’, whose life possessed a Conradian glamour rarely glimpsed in an age of jet travel and media ...”

“... of refrigerators. He’s blasting with warmth out back.Mason & Dixon is the story of two men, Charles Mason (1728-86) and Jeremiah Dixon (1733-79). Both are drawn from history, as is the outline of their doings, and as are many of the acquaintances they happen upon en route. Mason begins the tale as an astronomer at Greenwich; Dixon as a journeyman ...”

“... first time in the treaty – between the rival realms of Europe, an idea developed in England by Charles Davenant and Jonathan Swift; on the other, in the ideal of a federation of states to secure the peaceful unity of the continent, as proposed by the Abbé de Saint-Pierre in France. The first became canonical in the diplomatic chancelleries of the ...”

“... because of the tolerance now legally extended to gays in the Armed Forces would make of this passage (referring to Buckle’s scavenging activities on behalf of the mess) taken from the official Scots Guards regimental history: ‘Eggs were not the sole commodity Lieutenant Buckle collected; a brother officer alleged that he “walked over to the German ...”

“... by the greenhouse effect on earth. At the prompting of a geochemist and oceanographer called Charles David Keeling, the observatory of Mauna Loa on Hawaii had been collecting data on the level of CO2 in the atmosphere since 1959. The result – the ‘Keeling curve’ – clearly showed that levels of atmospheric CO2 were rising sharply. In 1979, Jimmy ...”

“... of ‘historical London figures’ and ‘modern day heroes’. Ada (Lovelace), who worked with Charles Babbage on his ‘analytical engine’, is paired with Phyllis (Pearsall), the artist who claimed to have tramped three thousand miles in mapping streets for the A-Z. The most recent partnership, Jessica (Ennis) and Ellie (Simmonds), were christened, as ...”

“... Ackroyd’s obvious follow-up was the Thames: generator of life, origin of the city, a passage between the eternal verities of deep England and the world ocean. Drawing on the example of Hilaire Belloc’s The Historic Thames: A Portrait of England’s Greatest River (1907), Ackroyd discovers in this 214-mile journey, from Cotswolds to North Sea, a ...”

“... week at least, Wilde was as much an ordinary man as a flamboyant artist who willed his own demise. Charles Ricketts, who designed books for him, wrote that ‘most writers on Wilde see in him the aesthete, the predestined victim of a theory, and the martyr to a subversive cult.’ This was wrong: ‘His childish hints at strange sins in Dorian Gray and other ...”

“... the land as something other than an endpoint for settlement. The treaty allowed settlers safe passage to territories further west, but an ample space for the Lakota seemed assured. In practice, the sheer number of miners traversing the territory, and the new mineral deposits discovered in Indian lands, made violations of this treaty and others an ...”

“... Bart or Undine Spragg, routinely anathematise the hypocritical society matrons who obstruct their passage to wealth and status: their aversion seems grounded in Wharton’s own polite loathing of her grand yet self-absorbed mother. In the mordantly sapphic novels of Elizabeth Bowen, older women are depicted as seductive and treacherous – enchanting ...”