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“... Early on, I learned from the Russian intelligentsia that the only meaning of life is conscious participation in the making of history.’ In this line from the memoirs of Victor Serge – revolutionary, exile, implacable opponent of capitalism, critic and sometimes accomplice of Bolshevik terror – there is an entire worldview that is now as foreign to Serge’s admirers as to his enemies ...”

“... derived, it would seem, more from sculpture than from life. Areas of light and shade on their white flesh complicate the rhythm. In Esther before Ahasuerus, light dramatises poses that gather to a climax around the central figure: in The Muses it gives substance to a visual meditation on strong, solid bodies. As in Esther, gestures are more important than ...”

“... is a jovial family man who’s retired and enjoying being on holiday with his wife; the second has white hair, a white beard and a slim tanned body. He invites me to a poetry evening at a restaurant called the Apple-Something, where he’s going to be reading tonight. He says he’s ‘a bohemian with a very conservative ...”

“... or at himself? Or both? If he does finally get taken down, escorted by federal guards from the White House or, after he has left office, extracted from Mar-a-Lago or from one Trump property or another, he will doubtless be spewing accusations and insults as he goes. He will try to destroy in the course of being destroyed. But for him it will be the scene ...”

“... is an exceptional pianist recovering from his mother’s suicide. His musical gift is shared by Judith, one of the twin-sister narrators of Cassandra. Cassie, the other sister, is a troubled but obviously talented writer. Baker’s characters have gifts and they defend them. ‘To be like us isn’t easy,’ Cassie jokes aloud, though she means it: ‘it ...”

“... lugubriously relating a version of the Baroness’s love affair when she lived among other white settlers in British East Africa (1914-1931). The Baroness’s memoir has the same setting, but it is mostly about black natives, and her love affair is never discussed: it is hinted at in a rather tantalising way. There is much humour, of a sardonic ...”

“... to solicit my expert opinion was Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy by Judith Brown, a social historian at Stanford University. The Times was particularly interested, the reporter explained, because another book about lesbian nuns in contemporary America had recently been published and was promptly banned from sale in ...”

“... this grace by completing his knowledge of self and world, thus returning to Eden by the back door. Judith, Nicholas Mosley’s latest novel, takes Kleist’s essay, with its switchback logic that equates god with puppet, as one of its main sources of meaning. Part of the book is set in an ashram in India (squalid hippy camp or Garden of Eden?) run by a ...”

“... rescued through the efforts of missionaries, who transformed them into ‘Children of the Great White Queen’.Though I didn’t know it then, H.E. Marshall’s tropes of Māori savagery echoed the descriptions of the ‘land of Ire’ in 16th and 17th-century English propaganda. The Irish were ‘savage’, ‘irregular and wild’, ‘little better than ...”

“... I’ll hit you.’ ‘My first ball dress – can you see it? Do remember: yards and yards of white tulle, tiny bands of satin and a simple string of pearls.’ ‘That was the night she said I couldn’t embarrass her in my German fancy dress.’ We realise that Leda is a very sinister lady, that she is out to avenge indignities suffered at the ...”

“... employers are afraid of lawsuits. If Bishop had a sense of impunity, it’s no wonder. She was white, well-connected and well-off. She’d long been coddled by the law, and until Huntsville there seemed to be nothing she couldn’t get away with. In 1986, for example, she was immediately released by the police, even though she refused to put her gun down ...”

“... if not exaggerated; the wonderfully quirky nose’s sharp tip is enhanced by a visible dab of white pigment; the horizontal flare of the nostril is anything but classic. What Mrs Riddle has is character, something as different from the vapid elegance of Sargent’s sitter as it is from the primitive energy of another almost contemporary portrait of a ...”

“... aunt or even mother – knitting placidly beside her, and with her clothes – red-lined jacket, white petticoat and blue stockings – laid over the back of the other chair. William Rush chips industriously in the background. In interesting contrast to the Vermeer or the Courbet, which also showed the facts of the studio as well as the allegory under ...”

“... way back in 1978. I went with three fellow Shelleyans, Geoffrey Matthews, Claire Tomalin and Judith Chernaik, to hear Marion Stocking talk about Claire. Marion Stocking’s beautifully-edited Journals of Claire Clairmont had just come out, and she knew more about Claire than all the brains of the Byron Society put together. This did not stop those brains ...”

“... of the Florentine nation or even identify the figure. For the abbé, it was ‘a great phantasm of white marble, well worked and all of one piece’ (‘ung grand fantosme de marbre blanc, bien ouvre et tout dune piece’). Fantosme can be translated as ‘ghost’, though the word left it unclear whether the apparition existed in the world or in the ...”