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“... at once floral and, again, classical (Delphine is ‘statuesque’ and, even better, ‘pale’). John James Todd’s lover in The New Confessions is called Doon, an odd, intractable name, one which gives Todd the chance both to dream of some shared Celtic origin and to call her by a (real) name which is shared by no other woman and which kicks up all sorts ...”

“... 16th century. And when Sherlock Holmes in the ‘Adventure of the Norwood Builder’ (1903) greets John Hector McFarlane, who has just burst unceremoniously into 221b Baker Street, with the words ‘you mentioned your name, as if I should recognise it, but I assure you that, beyond the obvious facts that you are a bachelor, a solicitor, a Freemason, and an ...”

“... to commit suicide, but the coroner decided it was an accident. While the premature deaths of, say, John Berryman and Delmore Schwartz and Sylvia Plath seemed somehow implicit in the trajectory of their careers, there was nothing remotely maudit about Jarrell, until the last couple of years of his life, when the approach of his 50th birthday induced a bout of ...”

“... opened to ‘anyone who wished’ to see it, an occasion that coincided with the festivities of St John the Baptist, Florence’s patron saint, when the city put its richest treasures on view. For Vasari, the extraction of the David from a mangled block of marble was nothing short of a miracle; Michelangelo had succeeded in ‘bringing back to life one who was ...”

“... A rich​ old American in John Banville’s new novel makes an amused distinction between money and small change. Asked what money is, he just laughs. This is not malevolent laughter but he does do a dangerous thing with his money. He leaves a lot of it, when he dies, to a young American niece. She is grateful, of course, and the money enhances her freedom – at first ...”

“... with an apprehension (closer in feeling to Scott’s novels than to his poems) that all the major figures are the victims and prisoners of their respective religions. They are involved in one of those amorous triangles so beloved of the sentimental 18th century, but where Rousseau in La Nouvelle Héloïse wrote about love, Byron writes of a fierce ...”

“... a vital part of his amatory and auditory imagination – part of the rhythm of his life across the major years of his mature work.Hale’s profession was her voice. She was an assistant professor of oral English at Simmons, Scripps and Smith Colleges, and taught elocution and voice training for actors. Yet speech between Emily and Tom was rare. One opening for ...”

“... with it the presidency of Herbert Hoover. After FDR’s nomination in July 1932, his running-mate John Nance Garner offered some succinct advice on how to conduct the campaign: ‘All you have to do is stay alive till November.’ ‘The only thing we have to fear is fear itself’: the phrase, used by Roosevelt in his inaugural address, may have been adapted ...”

“... John Donne​ is a modern rediscovery. His reputation, high among his contemporaries, fell after their time, along with those of other 17th-century metaphysical poets who would wait equally long for rehabilitation. The late 17th century and the 18th, committed to orderliness of metre and feeling, disliked the ‘forced’ and ‘unnatural’ rhythms of his verse, his ‘false’ conceits, his unruly sensuality ...”

“... from an arcade, secured by thick glass and ever-vigilant surveillance systems, large pieces by major names lost in Edenic atria, pastiches and approximations in side-streets and obscure courtyards. Art is the climate. If you aren’t being shown, walk into Tate Britain and hang your own work on the wall, making sure you have a photographer in ...”

“... They could have picked Mike Huckabee, the guitar-playing Arkansas radio preacher – ‘I didn’t major in math. I majored in miracles, and I still believe in them, too’ – and former governor who won the Iowa caucuses in 2008. Huckabee believes ‘that there’s more freedom in North Korea sometimes than there is in the United States,’ because ...”

“... Alix was intolerant: Klein, she said, ‘dances like an elephant’ – a severe handicap when the major preoccupation in Twenties Berlin was party-going. Alix clearly found vulgar Klein’s penchant for dressing up for these parties ‘as a kind of Cleopatra – terrifically décolletée – and covered in bangles and rouge’ and for being ‘frightfully ...”

“... Corona’ to her, and years later preached at her funeral. In 1609 she was remarried, to Sir John Danvers, a cultured and attractive gentleman half her age; the marriage was evidently a happy one, and George Herbert enjoyed a close relationship with his young stepfather. Walton depicts Magdalen as a helicopter parent, at least in the case of her eldest ...”

“... more mutually supportive. It was not that the British were unaware of the dangers of this. Sir John Troutbeck, one of the two Ambassadors of the Fifties examined in the chapter by William Roger Louis, was outspokenly crit ical of the immense social gaps, and in his view Western education had only made the younger generation of Iraqis more narrow-minded ...”

“... led to Thorpe’s disgrace and departure, and then to a bitter contest for the succession with John Pardoe, gave David Steel an almost impossible task. He was 39, but looked younger, a slight figure with an easy smile, a son of the Scottish manse, neither obviously at home with scholars, like Grimond, or in London society, like Thorpe. ‘The boy ...”