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“... father was persuaded to use on his patients a round lead object about the size of a bowling ball encased in leather. The procedure for promoting peristalsis was to lie the patient flat on his bed and roll the ball clockwise around the abdomen, following the course of the colon. Old Dr Thomas was disappointed in its ...”

“... with weariness, ready to drift away into a sensual stupor, like a whore coming out of a masked ball, snoozing in her carriage, so tipsy that the cushions feel soft, reassured by the sight of the gendarmes on the street with their sabres, protecting her from the urchins who might hoot insults at her.Republic or monarchy, we won’t get beyond all that for ...”

“... Intelligence of the British Fascists, to head its counter-subversion unit, and in 1927 sent Joseph Ball, who had been conducting black propaganda against the Labour Party, to become Director of Publicity at Conservative Central Office. A secret service diaspora was thus created whose influence is still being felt. Chronology alone is not sufficient to unpick ...”

“... of this animate inventory that makes Winogrand so important. Taking his lead from Georg Lukács, George Steiner wrote of Balzac that when he ‘describes a hat, he does so because a man is wearing it.’ Granted, in photography hats are forever being verbed – worn, carried, tipped – but it’s helpful to see Winogrand as a visual novelist whose work was ...”

“... had made. Kleinzahler was born in 1949 and grew up in Fort Lee, New Jersey, just across from the George Washington Bridge. He went to college in Wisconsin, but dropped out and drifted a while, before enrolling at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, where his favourite 20th-century poet, Basil Bunting, happened to be teaching that year. Afterwards ...”

“... Wear. Her body was found the next morning in the derelict Old Exchange Building. In 1993, one man, George Heron, had been acquitted of her murder; now another, David Boyd, was about to stand trial.In 1992, Sunderland’s shipyards had closed down, Monkwearmouth colliery was about to be mothballed and, though Liebherr cranes still tilted their long necks across ...”

“... to bear on Britain, in early 1954 Makarios met secretly with a retired colonel of the Greek army, George Grivas, to plan a guerrilla campaign to liberate the island. Even by the standards of the Greek right, not fastidious in its choice of men or means, Grivas was a nervi on the extreme wing of counter-revolution. A veteran of the disastrous Greek thrust into ...”

“... he wrote, and in the breast of every admirer. Invoking Milton’s Satan, or Napoleon, or George III (in a long and elaborate poem), Lowell does not so much identify with those persons as cause them to appear in a new light as Robert Lowell. Who else could they be? What else could the poets and poems taken over in Imitations be? It is significant that ...”

“... its title. Not many readers will get the allusion here to Tocqueville and Beaumont in America by George Wilson Pierson, published in 1938 and for a long time the standard account of the nine-month journey which Tocqueville undertook with his friend Gustave de Beaumont, ostensibly for the purpose of writing a report on the American prison system, but which ...”

“... among the many people who assisted them in their rewriting of their past. The Duke’s brother, George VI, made every effort to ensure that the fact that the King of England had been a Hitler supporter before the war was kept under wraps. Armand Grégoire, the Duchess’s Nazi lawyer, was tried for collusion with the enemy and sent to prison for ...”

“... intimacy with the royal family was the jealousy it aroused among less favoured acquaintances. At a ball at Londonderry House the Queen sent for Osbert and was ‘too charming for words ... I saw one or two people I don’t like looking very cross.’ At the Duchess of Sutherland’s he was less fortunate but he was solaced by a short chat with Queen Mary. Her ...”

“... to take a look at all those cheesecake photos they were always taking of her: throwing a beach-ball; licking an ice-cream cone. A drawer full of images was spread out before her. After a little while, according to Lee Server’s new biography, she ‘kind of shrugged, and she said: “Jeez . . . From the way people went on so, I thought I was ...”

“... the special CIA unit tasked with hunting Osama bin Laden. ‘She just looked in her crystal ball and it said that he was bad,’ one of her co-workers told Jane Mayer of the New Yorker. The error was exposed in 2005 by the New York Times. The CIA completed its own review of the case in 2007. It turned out that Bikowsky didn’t have probable cause, or ...”

“... Die Frau ohne Schatten and Arabella. These, I would say, constitute half a safety-net, half a ball and chain, meaning that Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874-1929) won’t ever go away. All the same, when one thinks of him in English, he’s nothing like the author of a yellow ten-volume set of works that he is in German – five of plays, three of essays and ...”

“... sympathetic. On reading a review of Adam Bede in 1859, Bodichon intuited, brilliantly, that ‘George Eliot’ was Evans’s pseudonym. (George Eliot’s Romola was a tribute to her.) The example of Evans-Lewes made Bodichon willing to contemplate a ‘free union’ with Evans’s ex-partner John Chapman, the editor of ...”