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“... two editors don’t reveal, nothing, except for the letters, is arranged in chronological order. James MacGibbon, Stevie’s literary editor, does not comment on this, but says in his rather cautious preface that their choice is ‘tantamount to an autobiographical profile’. This is not quite so, but he is surely right in saying that the book will give ...”

“... he will keep peeing in wicked places. The sequences featuring three eventually famous friends, James Prior of Northern Ireland, Peter May of England, one of its cricket captains, and William Rees-Mogg, late of the Times, are among the tightest and funniest things he has written. May is present, while utterly silent, as a ...”

“... well-known and the distinguished, neatly making the distinction between the two: ‘Was it Clive James or Jorge Luis Borges, the famous Argentine poet, who pointed out that if we saw every leaf on the tree we would go mad?’ But it takes a talent of greater stamina and range to realise these skills over 184 pages, including index. (Index? Who but reviewers ...”

“... with whom they were on especially intimate terms), writers (Barrie, Meredith, Hardy, Henry James), and theatrical people (Irving and Ellen Terry). Sargent painted Elizabeth, and Max Beerbohm drew no fewer than seven affectionate caricatures of her husband. Most of the cases Juxon narrates at some length are twice-told tales, and circumstances have ...”

“... political ferment in European history, from the Twelve Articles of the German peasants in 1525 to William Blake. Yet Warr is emphatic on the need for a spiritual reading of what Sedley and Kaplan want to read materially: ‘These administrations [of law, gospel and spirit] are of a spiritual, not chronical, consideration, and are not distinguished by fleshly ...”

“... the Eternall Dove,   A black-fac’d house will love. A hundred and fifty years later we find William Blake putting forward the same idea in his ‘The Little Black Boy’ (1789): My mother bore me in the southern wild, And I am black, but O! my soul is white Blake has his little black boy meeting a ‘little English boy’ in heaven, and the final ...”

“... scar. How can the celebrity outsider maintain a sense of his identity, or painterly authority, when he is his own subject-matter and his audience sees that subject-matter as ‘other’, less than ‘us’? Basquiat’s solutions to this dilemma are often brilliant. In the triptych Zydeco (1984), for example, a cinematographer in profile looks through the lens of his movie camera ...”

“... practised in public elsewhere. Sawday includes an observer’s description of the embalmment of James I: The King’s body was about the 29th of March disembowelled, and his harte was found to be great but soft, his liver fresh as a young man’s; one of his kidneys very good, but the other shrunke so littel as they could hardly find yt ... the semyture of ...”

“... art. Reading Gaston, I was reminded repeatedly of paintings by Lawrence Alma-Tadema and John William Waterhouse. Pater’s interest in these works might help us to understand their appeal not only to his contemporaries, but to audiences today. Queen Margaret of Navarre is first mentioned in the novel with a Greek quotation that links her to Homer’s ...”

“... easier to understand. A video, too, was in some quarters said to be to blame for the killing of James Bulger in 1993. But once again, the willingness to accept this had to do with the extent to which Child’s Play 3 provided in the figure of Chucky a fictional precedent for Robert Thompson and Jon Venables: not an inspiration to the children, but an ...”

“... about circumcision, which was not practised in England – or even drink his blood. According to James Shapiro in his excellent Shakespeare and the Jews (1990) it was even thought that Jewish men menstruated and might need an occasional supplement of gentile blood. Then there were the stories about Jewish abuse of the Host. If any of this got into ...”

“... Men’s Association, a body which called for ‘rational’ organic reform: so organic that William Lovett, its figurehead, later turned to writing manuals on physiology, diet and anatomy. Although they drafted the original People’s Charter, Lovett’s men were soon overtaken by the Chartist leaders of the Midlands and the North: men such as Humphrey ...”

“... at Marham was made a permanent military unit. Lord Tedder’s RAF Deputy Chief of Staff, Sir William Dickson, proposed that the US bases remain designated as Royal Air Force stations: a cosmetic disguise intended to alleviate local hostility to the presence of foreign military forces on British soil in peacetime. The proposal was accepted, and on this ...”

“... of his European friends, by contrast, delighted in his lack of grandeur. ‘Adorable’ was Henry James’s word for him; he was ‘the most approachable, the most practicable, the least unsafe man of genius it has been my fortune to meet. He was so simple, so natural, so modest, so destitute of personal pretension … that one almost doubted at moments ...”

“... I started writing it, in my head, the very second I saw the video footage of the Liverpool toddler James Bulger being led away by the two ten-year-olds who would become his murderers. There was something familiar about the boys – their jackets, their haircuts, their way of inclining their heads to one another, their furtiveness, their ...”