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“... fine-fleeced sheep that adorns the frieze of the Parthenon (and looks as though it were drawn by William Blake himself), through the sheep of Byzantine mosaics and Mogul paintings, to those of the miniatures of a miscellany of breviaries, psalteries and bestiaries. The habitats of sheep in most countries of the world are illustrated and are identified in a ...”

“... shall hardly be a ‘self’ at all.Among Creeley’s early correspondents were Charles Olson and William Carlos Williams, who served, somewhat, as father figures. His actual father, a doctor, died when Creeley was four, after which the family’s fortunes took a serious downturn. Creeley first wrote to Williams in February 1950, soliciting work for a small ...”

“... word “love”,’ Billie Holiday says in her memoir Lady Sings the Blues (written in 1956 with William Dufty and now reissued). Like Kafka’s hunger artist, Holiday let song make a spectacle of her deprivation. ‘I don’t need a friend/My heart is broken, it won’t ever mend/I ain’t much carin’/Just where I will end,’ she sang in ‘I Must Have ...”

“... in a ten-year-old American translation, printed in Great Britain but not otherwise Anglicised. William Hannaher’s translation is particularly effective in its rendering of the author’s virtuoso gifts of metaphor and simile. Kis’s style highlights not only Eduard’s grand visionary projects but the most mundane experiences and objects, from the ...”

“... nervous illnesses which Richard Greaves unhelpfully approaches by means of psychiatric theory and William Styron’s compelling account of his own severe depression. In 1650 Bunyan had heard three or four women discussing religion: they were, he said, ‘far above out of my reach’, and he began seeking out the company of these people, who were members of a ...”

“... William Faulkner​ ’s story ‘Go Down, Moses’ begins with a lengthy description of a man. But it’s hard to get a handle on him. If the drapes, pleats and price of his suit are all ‘too much’, his face is ‘black, smooth, impenetrable’. The story elaborates on these details but also draws attention to the fact that they fail to interest his interlocutor, a ‘spectacled white man sitting with a broad census-taker’s portfolio ...”

“... the Times on seven other pages. The Sunday Times features on six pages. The Times columnist Robert Harris gets two entries compared to Germaine Greer’s one, Gandhi’s one, or Mandela’s one. Noam Chomsky: nil. E.P Thompson: nil. The Times columnist Bernard Levin: two. Levin deserves a special mention. In the Times in May 1996, he implied that Jerry, a ...”

“... in 1818. In October 1823, at a masked ball in Liverpool, a local newspaper reported: ‘Mr Harris, of Preston, personated (we are told) Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus. His appearance was most singular. His dress was of variegated colours, one half dark, the other light. His face was of different hues, the colours running insensibly into each ...”

“... of Economic Affairs was set up in the mid-1950s, its co-directors were a Conservative, Ralph Harris, and a Liberal, Arthur Seldon, who preached their gospel to both parties, indeed to anybody who would listen. The Orange Book liberalism of Clegg and Laws, which came as such a surprise to so many Liberal Democrat voters, but not until after they had cast ...”

“... Edith Swan-Neck, mother of his children. This piece, by the Anglo-German sculptor Charles Augustus William Wilke, was banished from the grounds of Hastings Museum to a corner of the West Marina Gardens in St Leonards-on-Sea adequate to its transcendent obscurity. The decaying low-baroque tableau of conjugal tenderness, features eaten away by the syphilis of ...”

“... by the pathos and surprising detail of lives rarely chronicled elsewhere. There is poor René Harris, a Catholic organ-maker in Augustan London eager to improve himself. We learn that someone this marginal nonetheless wanted and was able to commission a portrait of his wife. But it was while he was away mending organs to pay for such status-objects that ...”

“... like a ballroom without women. Then I remember foot and mouth and put out more viricide and straw. William Youatt, whose The Pig: A Treatise on the Breeds, Management, Feeding and Medical Treatment of Swine of 1847 is still the standard work on the British pig, prints many anecdotes of the docility, gentleness, affection, cleanliness, intelligence, even ...”

“... it is better that we don’t. Still, I hear that festschrifts for two female historians, Jose Harris and Pat Thane, are being planned. I await them with ...”

“... most real when it’s at its most sham self. The architect and pamphleteer Thomas ‘Victorian’ Harris fretted about the 19th century’s inability to create an architecture peculiar to itself, its age, its engineering, its steam power and its myriad inventions, all the while failing to see that the architecture he craved was being made right in front of ...”

“... and fetch good prices too, chief justices, lords lieutenant, lords mayor, George Moore, Sir William Orpen, Sir John Lavery, Walter Osborne, Jack Yeats, my famous namesake his brother Bill, Padraic Colum, John Millington Synge, young painters like Paddy Tuohy who really did paint old J.S. Joyce and died of his own hand, poor Sean O’Sullivan who died of ...”