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“... we find one of Bellini’s greatest paintings, his late altarpiece of Saint Jerome between Saints Christopher and Louis of Toulouse, which is reproduced on the jacket of The Altarpiece in Renaissance Venice. The book opens with a consideration of which elements in this painting were conditioned by its setting. The church interior is illustrated in black and ...”

“... palms and soft lamps. A clutch of buildings is dominated by a high villa, furnished in dark wood and heavy drapes; after Stalin’s death, the villa passed to the collective ownership and pleasure of the Politburo, more recently to become a high-class sanatorium. In one of the outbuildings, a billboard spells out the stern order of Soviet collective ...”

“... kind of falling away. (The gain is obvious enough and thus less interesting to analyse.) I asked Christopher Hitchens, long before he was terminally ill, where he would go if he had only a few weeks to live. Would he stay in America? ‘No, I’d go to Dartmoor, without a doubt,’ he told me. It was the landscape of his childhood. Dartmoor, not the MD ...”

“... scholars – C.K. Stead, Ronald Bush, Julius himself – believe that the review was by Eliot. Christopher Ricks doesn’t disagree with this judgment – whether or not Eliot wrote the review, he observes in T.S. Eliot and Prejudice, it has ‘the stamp of his approval and the stamp of his tone’. Calling the anonymous notice ‘shameful’, Ricks ...”

“... of, such as the new Kensington Central Library. Sometimes they dressed up as Victorians, or as Christopher Wren in a bath chair, and carried a cardboard coffin symbolising the moribund state of affairs. Boty, in costume as a Dresden shepherdess, naturally caught the public eye. Interviewed by the Daily Express in 1959 she pronounced the Air Ministry ...”

“... in the Garden, ‘Bellow had three sons: Greg, Adam, and Dan. He also had three disciples: James Wood, Leon Wieseltier and Martin Amis.’ Wood, the literary critic and novelist; Wieseltier, the former literary editor of the New Republic; and Amis, who, on the death of his father, Kingsley, declared to Bellow, ‘You’ll ...”

“... a special cash award for him, then she put him into the hands of a remarkable agent called Audrey Wood who immediately began nudging him towards fame and fortune. At one stage, esteemed but not yet famous, he was engineered a job as a screenwriter at MGM. They wanted him to fashion what he termed a ‘celluloid brassiere’ for Lana Turner, but he insisted on ...”

“... Anglo-Irish writers, whose ability to use the English language brilliantly masks an unease’ (Christopher Murray). On the one hand, there is something narrow about the requirement to produce unease as a passport to national identity and, on the other, it seems a poor reading of Incognita and the plays to represent them as serene and secure. The final ...”

“... Rowe in 1709) adds force. The book opens with a brisk pair of essays by David Fallow and Michael Wood on the subject of his parents: John Shakespeare, born in about 1530, the son of a tenant farmer in the outlying village of Snitterfield, and Mary née Arden, some years younger, of a more prosperous family from Wilmcote. Neither of their baptisms is ...”

“... he would enjoy until the end of life. He died there in 1962 of a brain haemorrhage while cutting wood, a month before his 68th birthday. At Harvard he roomed with John Dos Passos and could hardly have had a better time acting as boho, bolshy and radical as Harvard boys of that era were allowed to be, while at that same time calling attention to himself as an ...”

“... trick also licensed comparatively plain language, arhythmia and absence of rhyme in the manner of Christopher Reid’s pseudo-translations from a supposedly Eastern European language, Katerina Brac (1985). A further twist is introduced in God’s Gift to Women by ‘Candlebird’ (‘after’ the eighth-century Arabic poet Abbas Ibn al-Ahnaf), where a lover ...”

“... with barely a second glance: the courtier MP William Collier and the theatrical impresario Christopher Rich, for instance, whose battle for control of Drury Lane Hill briefly blundered into in 1711; or the women writers such as Eliza Haywood and Martha Fowke, alias ‘Clio’, who were part of the literary circle that formed around Hill in the early ...”

“... country that had taken in the refugee from Nazi Austria. Someone had to counter the flab and dead wood, and there was at that time no denunciation from within. Nevertheless, it’s possible to feel that the energy of aggression, the sheer blood-lust, was in excess of the necessary. There is a parallel with Leavis: an outsider (though native-born) equally ...”

“... its Degas, Delacroix and Toulouse-Lautrecs, its ‘James Bond’ features and 17th-century olive-wood panelling? Who else was an object of some interest to Mick Jagger, François Mitterrand and Greta Garbo, to Gorbachev, Judy Garland – ‘Rudi’, ‘Judy’, ‘Rudi’, ‘Judy’ – and François Truffaut? And, among those who were, who was also ...”

“... of the master mason John Wastell sits in harmony with later Flemish stained glass and French wood carving, embellished with classical motifs. It is Gothic going on Renaissance. Instead, cut off from Continental influence, after the initial hiatus, the story of architecture in Britain and Ireland over the next three centuries took a different direction ...”