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“... The earliest pictures are sketches from his time as a student at the Slade, where he studied under Henry Tonks, befriended Augustus John and was chucked out after a few months for poor attendance; they show him to be a talented and restrained draughtsman. Eight years later, having flirted with the idea of becoming a poet, he turned to primitivism: Anthony ...”

“... boards the Northern Line. At Hampstead everyone else exits; but at the next station, a Golders Green of the imagination, dead souls crowd in and the train trundles him away to the underworld. In A Word Child, surely the best of Iris Murdoch’s non-magical novels, a civil servant racked with remorse cruises for solace round and round the Circle ...”

“... artistic purpose, forests were often elaborately presented. In the great tournament ordered by Henry VIII in 1511, for example, the king and three companions, presenting themselves as ‘les quater Chivalers de la forrest salvigne’, emerged from an elaborate artificial wood, consisting of ‘12 hawthorns, 12 oaks, 12 maples, 10 birches, 16 dozen fern ...”

“... the eye fails to escape through a gap on the right, blocked with more of the same muddy green. These men were Communards, shot and dumped over the wall at a time of terrible retribution which saw the French army, tasked with reclaiming Paris, execute as many as 25,000 of their fellow citizens. James Tissot, The Execution of Communards by French ...”

“... In the spring or summer of 1599, the Chorus of Henry V, in Shakespeare’s only explicit reference to a contemporary politician, looked forward to the return of the 33-year-old Earl of Essex from his campaign in Ireland, ‘bringing rebellion broached on his sword’ – a light touch from which some heavy inferences have been drawn ...”

“... her life-companion. Ann’s health declines and Mary accompanies her to Lisbon, where she meets Henry, ‘a man of refinement’. But Ann dies, Henry, a little after, also dies, and the story closes with Mary in ‘a delicate state of health’ that ‘did not promise long life’. Brief as it is at fifty pages, this ...”

“... me fall in love with the dynamics of history: The Forsyte Saga, Buddenbrooks and The Education of Henry Adams. I discovered Adams’s autobiography last, when it headed the preparatory reading list, alphabetically organised, that I was sent in advance of arriving at university. (I still haven’t got round to the other autobiography in the As, Saint ...”

“... Elizabeth. The greater part of the book explores the plays about English history: the six King Henry plays and two King Richard plays, which relate the origins and course of the Wars of the Roses, and King John. But there are also extensive discussions of the contemporary political pertinence of Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida ...”

“... virtues of the King Edward potato, adding perfunctorily that it was not ‘an eating potato’. Henry James would have seen the point. In 1870 he wrote to his elder brother William from Malvern, England, where the hotel fed him mostly on mutton and potatoes, to say how much he missed ‘unlimited tomatoes & beans & peas & squash & turnips & carrots & corn ...”

“... of 1851 celebrated ‘the working bees of the world’s hives’, according to its instigator, Henry Cole, who was to industrial design what Lubbock was to almost everything else. Careful fieldwork had established that the true model of industry, the ant, laid aside provender for the winter months, thereby furnishing a six-legged symbol of thrift. When it ...”

“... in squares and parks all over her erstwhile empire than with a portrait like Sargent’s of Henry James, which encourages you to look for evidence of personality in physiognomy. Iconic portraits by contrast are suitable memorials of reputation. That is what the boardroom and the college committee are after, even if they very rarely get it. The ...”

“... a triumph – an acquaintance is cited here as drawling that her ‘ability’ to live in Palmers Green while moving in London literary circles was ‘the most compelling thing about her’. First-named throughout this book, by biographers who apparently never met her, Stevie Smith and her work are draped in Palmers Greenery. Would a biographer of Hughes call ...”

“... seems to have shared his not-so-secret preference for Jane over Cassandra: another Austen nephew, Henry, of whom Austen had been particularly fond in his teens, told a cousin after Austen’s death that whenever he visited the house at Chawton – where Cassandra and Mrs Austen lived on for some years – ‘he could not help expecting to feel particularly ...”

“... organisations. There was large-scale unemployment; wages dropped. The Workingman’s Paradise, as Henry Kingsley had called Australia, turned into an exploitative hell. This was the time that William Lane formed the New Australia movement which settled some four hundred men, women and children in Paraguay in an attempt to establish a socialist commune. It was ...”

“... Ruth as home run baseball floating in the air, unmistakably baseball and unmistakably Ruth. And Henry Major’s Ernst Lubitsch, Will Cotton’s Theodore Dreiser, Hirschfeld’s Bojangles Robinson, and more and more, all well-known and all made new. That shock of the familiar, the celebrity instantly recognisable by the trademark logo that the artist ...”