“... observed behaviourist rants (trashing the proles), small revenges. The Modernist experiment (Mary Butts, Djuna Barnes, John Rodker) was discounted, along with the social realists (Robert Westerby, James Curtis, Alexander Baron), who remain trapped in a ghetto of unfashionable leftist politics and unfashionable locations. The locations ...”

“... of US military forces in Europe was to discourage ‘the revival of German militarism’. Douglas Lute, the US ambassador to Nato under Obama, was even more explicit. The alliance ‘fundamentally serves a vital American interest’, he said, since in the event of a crisis the US ‘enters that crisis with thirty like-minded, militarily capable ...”

“... in a ten-gallon cowboy hat. The obvious contrast between the sylvan dream of his upbringing – Douglas firs, rainbow trout – and the nightmarishness of his films was hard to ignore, not least because he played up to it. ‘As an eagle scout in Missoula, Montana, did you have such graphic visions of violence?’ a reporter asked at the premiere of his ...”

“... to a takeover bid by MAI plc, the owners of Meridian TV, but before the deal had been made public. Mary Archer, the wife of the Conservative peer Lord Archer, was a non-executive director of Anglia and had been present at board meetings at which the takeover had been discussed. In a statement, the DTI confirmed that inspectors were investigating ‘possible ...”

“... a strident propagandist of atheism. He scattered foul-mouthed quips about Christ and the Virgin Mary ‘almost into every company he cometh’; he wrote treatises pointing out ‘contrarieties’ in the Bible; he spoke trenchantly about the political use of religion ‘to keep men in awe’. The difficulty in assessing Marlowe’s atheism is that we don’t ...”

“... latter. After the death of her mother, when Teresa was eleven, she found a surrogate in the Virgin Mary and spirituality in tales of sainthood and sacrifice. Aged twenty she took holy orders at the local Carmelite convent. In the following years she fell strangely ill, and during a protracted recovery became, by her own admission, a mediocre nun. This was the ...”

“... look like angels singing in exaltation, so innocent are their expressions.’ One of them was Mary Lygon, who came to lunch in January 1935, ‘looking as pretty and as peach-like as ever … so surprised and innocent and yet, I suppose, she has slept with every man one knows in London.’ If Channon has an affinity with Proust, it’s not so much in his ...”

“... who showed up in 1852 and saw the fortune to be made from cutting down the stands of gigantic Douglas firs on the neighbouring hills and feeding them to his steam mill, and the founders of Microsoft, Starbucks and Amazon, lay a stretch of time little longer than one old person’s range of memory. There must have been people around in 1960 who could ...”

“... an accolade bestowed in 1924, on the occasion of a special visit by King George V and Queen Mary towards the end of the season. The programme culminated, at the king’s request, with the Sea Songs (he found ‘Rule, Britannia!’ a ‘jolly fine tune’, infinitely to be preferred to ‘The Red Flag’). The BBC’s sponsorship and transmissions ...”

“... the attempt. But it also points to a lack on the other side. America has had Rosalind Krauss, Douglas Crimp, Hal Foster and Craig Owens setting up positions, rationalising developments; in Britain there’s very little general pro-contemporary art theory. But then in New York the battle-lines and the historical stopping-off points were always far ...”

“... More surprisingly, there is an essay about the out-of-fashion novelist and short story writer Mary Lavin. ‘About’ has to be the word because the piece is heavily contextual, using Lavin to illustrate the stranglehold of Catholicism on Irish lives. Celibacy and small-town respectability are laid at the feet of the Vatican and linked to the cult of the ...”

“... he became a member of the Gaelic League, the organisation founded in 1893 by Eoin MacNeill and Douglas Hyde to promote the use of Irish as a spoken and literary language. This was part of the emergence of a cultural nationalism in Ireland after the fall of Parnell. By 1904, the year Joyce left Ireland, the Gaelic League had 600 branches with 50,000 ...”