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“... his responses – he never forgot how Junius Booth, the father of Lincoln’s murderer, had played Richard III – Whitman also had a shrewd eye for the incongruous. Even his moving and heroic poem on Lincoln’s death suggests an absurdity inseparable from the face of heroism. And it was in that direction that Stephen Crane’s odd sleepwalker’s gift was to ...”

“... operatives. I think he was a great dreamer and a great man’; she said so to her biographer E.K. Brown, who she thought had discounted her investment in this dream of the past. Cather was in her early thirties, on the verge of moving to New York to become an editor at McClure’s, an ambitious monthly magazine, when she published her first story collection ...”

“... dust clouds boiling into the phantasm of Tiger Woods Design’s golf development – I encountered brown and black men, on foot, parted from their families for three, five, even ten years, and ekeing out an existence on $10 a day or less. When they weren’t too intimidated to talk to me, they had nothing positive to say about their situation: their faces were ...”

“... of their healthy first-preference vote, the widespread popularity of their Tasmanian leader, Bob Brown, and their prominence in the electoral campaign, they are absent from the House of Representatives. So are the Democrats (equivalent to the Lib Dems). As commentators have emphasised, the results bestow absolute power on the prime minister – a ...”

“... of all Hogarth’s extant portraits. Many of course are already very well known – Garrick as Richard III on the eve of the Battle of Bosworth, Garrick and his wife Eva-Maria Veigel, the painting known as The Shrimp Girl, the self-portrait of Hogarth with his unfortunately named pug Trump – but to see all the portraits together is a revelation, and ...”

“... peas are yellow and wrinkled, others green and round, or why one person has blue eyes, another brown. Development, though, was a science of similarities, asking for instance why humans, in their trajectory from fertilised egg to adult, are generally bilaterally symmetrical, each with two eyes, two arms terminating in five-fingered hands. An attempt to ...”

“... a braided rug, a tear in the screen door, a bust of Brahms, the water oiling itself between brown riverbanks. Under the tutelage of Mary Tucker, perhaps the first woman she ever loved romantically, she practised the piano for hours a day, repeating the same tricky passages until she was a general menace to the neighbourhood. After a bout of rheumatic ...”

“... of fractured looking on the internet; either way, it is full of diverting detail. In 1707, Thomas Brown wrote that some of the singing men at St Paul’s Cathedral and Westminster Abbey ‘dayly come wreeking hot out of a Bawdy-House into the Church; and others Stagger out of a Tavern to Afternoon-Prayers, and Hickup over a little of the Littany, and so back ...”

“... off without anaesthetic. A few days later, he suffered another blow: the death of his infant son, Richard. Although the wound healed well, the recovery would have been gruelling. All the while, the invoices and orders kept piling up. At the time of his surgery, Wedgwood styled himself ‘Potter to Her Majesty’ Queen Charlotte and was on the way to becoming ...”

“... would have been pleased by the comparison, citing Steinbeck, along with Theodore Dreiser and Richard Wright, Nelson Algren and Sherwood Anderson, as influences. All of them deployed melodrama to drive home the failure of America to live up to its ideals; all of them wrote to expose inequality and economic Darwinism. The Magic Kingdom is Banks’s ...”

“... your come-uppance without being wholly evil. In Shame, which stars the country’s heart-throb, Richard Mofe-Damijo, and ‘the ageless’ (and Hollywood-bound) Liz Benson, it is enough to falter. Daniel and Rena are a happily married couple with three children whose life changes when Daniel loses his job. He is wrongly accused of theft and tortured by the ...”

“... barefoot or otherwise. I then went to see K. B. McFarlane. My special subject in Schools was Richard II so I had been to McFarlane’s lectures on the Lollard Knights; I also had a copy of some notes on his 1953 Ford Lectures that was passed down from year to year in Exeter. I knew of his austere reputation and of his reluctance to publish from David ...”

“... percetive study of three men who died young, the painter Christopher Wood (1901-30), the war hero, Richard Hillary (1919-43), and Jeremy Wolfenden (1934-65) who was (or is?) the most spectacular failure of my Oxford generation. Faulks believes that ‘short lives are more sensitive indicators of the pressure of public attitudes than lives lived long and ...”

“... and leading news correspondents Crane met in Cuba such as Charles Michelson, Ernest McCready and Richard Harding Davis. These are rich materials but at the same time they are incomplete and sparse. Crane was not a prolific letter-writer and he left no diaries or memoir. Further confusing matters was Crane’s first biographer, Thomas Beer, whose Stephen ...”

“... analogous to the ‘Brunonian’ theory of medicine, invented by the Scottish physician John Brown, who had taught that health was an equilibrium between the ‘excitability’ of the nervous system, and the external stimuli by which it was activated. Every disease was the result either of insufficient stimulation, and therefore of wasted ...”