“... willow scrub. Day after day Street steered his plough through virgin soil, and as ‘the strip of black on the east side of that piece of prairie grew slowly wider and wider until it neared the west boundary,’ Street fancied he had written ‘a signature of which I shall never be ashamed … each furrow is such a definite little stride in the world’s ...”

“... he’s lied under oath to the Congress of the United States. There’s no one left to lie to.’ Christopher Hitchens borrows Schippers’s scornful punch line for the title of his own screed against the President. Unperturbed by his proximity to right-wing Clinton-bashers like Schippers, Hitchens mounts a relentless and often compelling attack from the left ...”

“... for the hell of it, with the aid of a small army of dacoits, Thugs and zombies. ‘His props,’ Christopher Frayling writes, ‘include an arsenal of rare poisons in bubbling glassware, rare fungi and bacilli, exotic brightly coloured insects with lots of legs (“my deadly ministers”), and such fiendish torture devices as “The Zayat Kiss”, “The ...”

“... lords, how fare you? NAVARRE: My lord, they say That all the Protestants are massacred! This is Christopher Marlowe’s The Massacre at Paris, a play free of amateur pageants but featuring 19 onstage killings, most of them stabbings (one of an admiral whom we have already seen being shot, and another, a regicide, using an envenomed dagger). There is also ...”

“... fantasy is current at the moment. In ‘A Whole School of Bourgeois Primitives’, for example, Christopher Reid designs another version of England caught in a moment of buzzy stasis: Our lawn in stripes, the cat’s pyjamas, rain on a sultry afternoon and the drenching, mnemonic smell this brings us surging out of the heart of the garden: these are ...”

“... they fight their way back home, a trek of a thousand miles, which first takes them north to the Black Sea then west to Byzantium. (The term anabasis technically denotes only the march ‘up country’ to Cunaxa; the march ‘down’ to the sea is properly the katabasis, that along the coast the parabasis.) On the way, the Greeks encountered Syrians who ...”

“... have been more at home with Rory Stewart, but there’s possibly a bit of Buchan’s vision in the Black Stone of Brexit, and a bit of Hannay in Johnson’s swagger. It can’t only be down to Hitchcock that The Thirty-Nine Steps has never been out of print, or that most bookshops still stock The Complete Richard Hannay, with only the retro Orange Penguin ...”

“... were forbidden. I was 16, or 16 and a half, and still at school when I read in the papers that a black American, Jimmy Wilson, had been sentenced to death for stealing a dollar. I can still recall that moment of deep shock. We couldn’t believe it. Even if he’d stolen a million, executing him was a bit much. So I got a few schoolfriends together, and said ...”

“... life’. Street children have ‘a vivid emblematic quality’. The sufferings of pre-20th-century black immigrants ‘represent in emblematic form the inflictions of London itself’. Tower Bridge is ‘a representative emblem’ – ‘in its immensity and complexity, it reflected the workings of the city itself.’ And, of course, there were ‘plenty of ...”

“... US: Gropius and Breuer to the Harvard School of Design after a brief stint in London; Albers to Black Mountain College and Mies to the Institute of Technology in Chicago. In 1937, also in Chicago, Moholy-Nagy founded an influential school of design known as the New Bauhaus. There they built a new, purist world of steel and glass, adapting their socialist ...”

“... and tone of the milieu in which Himmler had spent his early twenties in Bavaria. The clerical black garb spoke to the mysticism of a man who had forsaken Catholicism to embrace a raft of esoteric post-Christian fads. In the summer of 1940 he instructed the head of the Ahnenerbe (Ancestral Heritage), a research organisation within the SS, to investigate ...”

“... daughters. Local sensitivities being what they are, they agree it’s best if he doesn’t black up. Of Cato’s triumphant first night in 1713, Samuel Johnson wrote unkindly: ‘The Whigs applauded every line in which liberty was mentioned, as a satire on the Tories; and the Tories echoed every clap, to show that the satire was ...”

“... crime, ‘flexible’ on defence and foreign policy, solid for Israel, reputedly ‘good’ with black people, he is moreover young and once shook hands with John F. Kennedy. At the bar of the Sheraton Wayfarer in Manchester, the HQ of the travelling press corps, most correspondents report that their editors only want good news about the new consensus ...”

“... I first came across Christopher Logue’s ‘account’ of the Iliad in 1975 at Oxford where I went to hear a vigorous reading by two young men of Patrocleia, his version of Book XVI. It was an opportunity to experience the poem in its original medium, by the ear rather than the eye. Homer himself had probably chanted his verses plucking the strings of a lyre, like the bard Demodocus in the Odyssey and for many centuries after his death people did not read Homer: they listened to skilled rhapsodes, whose dramatic delivery mesmerised audiences and earned the performers ample rewards, as we know from Plato’s Ion ...”

“... allowed the veterans of the Thirties to lift the veil on their double lives. Isherwood’s Christopher and his Kind (1977) gives the most vivid account of the Weimar sub-culture, where ‘Berlin meant Boys.’ His earlier autobiographical writings, as he ruefully acknowledges, had been exercises in ‘avoiding the truth’. Similar equivocations had ...”