“... one Selznick employee thought Margaret Mitchell’s novel ‘ponderous trash’ and that another, John Van Druten, was sacked after calling it ‘a fine book for bellhops’. Well, there must be lots of bellhops. The world sales of the novel now total some ten million; and the film had already grossed $62 million by 1950. Not until the Sixties was it ...”

“... undignified and unnatural circus tricks. At the end of this formidable survey of the aristocracy John Beckett notes that they have survived into the late 20th century ‘as protectors of the nation’s heritage’ and that some ‘even argue that as collectors of beautiful objects over time their families were thinking not merely of self-interest but of the ...”

“... what is Mr Playfair doing writing a book about him? For an answer we may perhaps turn to Professor John Taylor, who has known Fred – or rather a mate of his called Uri – from both sides. Eight years ago Uri Geller – ex-fashion model, conjurer and convicted con-man – hit out television screens with a miraculous display of spoon-bending. The effect on ...”

“... There is,’ John Lord Campbell observed in his multi-volume, Mid-Victorian Lives of the Lord Chancellors, ‘no office in the history of any nation that has been filled with such a long succession of distinguished and interesting men as the office of Lord Chancellor.’ A roll-call which included such illustrious history-makers as Wolsey, More, Bacon and Clarendon lent some credence to Campbell’s hyperbole ...”

“... the fact that Matthew and Mark record the last words of Jesus as spoken in Aramaic, while Luke and John offer a different version, in Greek. But although Mark, followed by Matthew, offers various sayings in Aramaic he immediately translates them into Greek. The evangelists were addressing not only Gentiles but the large number of Jews whose ordinary language ...”

“... Like most biographies nowadays, David Nokes’s John Gay is very long, but unlike some of the others it is not much longer than it needed to be. Gay devoted so much of his attention to people grander than himself that his life story can’t be told without allusion to those of more complicated and ambitious figures like Pope, Swift and Addison ...”

“... with ‘O little town of Bethlehem’ (Phillips Brooks) and ‘Dear Lord and Father of mankind’ (John Greenleaf Whittier) as runners-up. Among the works of the canonical English poets, the lines known to most people are probably those beginning Blake’s Milton, ‘And did those feet in ancient time ...’, which Parry set to music and turned into the hymn ...”

“... only other models,’ she writes in this new biography, ‘are Renaissance figures such as John Dowland and Thomas Campion.’ (She might have looked sideways to Noël Coward, Bob Dylan or Cole Porter; to John Cage’s poetry, Ezra Pound’s operas, the compositions of Christopher Fry or Anthony Burgess.) One of the ...”

“... When he was 23, A.S.J. Tessimond (Arthur Seymour John, Jack to his family, but known as John in later life) wrote to Ezra Pound, who had recently settled in Rapallo, enclosing some poems and an article on George Bernard Shaw. Tessimond’s letter does not survive, but Pound’s reply does ...”

“... that orthodoxy calls most persuasively to those who know, as Christ told the woman of Samaria in John 4.10, that there is no living water in this life. Eliot could state this perception without complaint, and even joke about it in his sober way. He tells his brother about ‘the kink in my brain which makes life at all an unremitting strain for me, and which ...”

“... ten or so of his 17 films, he is, by anybody’s reckoning, flawless. It’s not surprising that John Ford never showed an interest; the ‘manly’ directors with whom Clift did work suspected he was gay, and, in John Huston’s case, tormented him for it. He was neither sardonic nor amused enough for Billy Wilder, but it ...”

“... of expression’. Now English poetry, dormant since Chaucer and Lydgate, got to its feet and sang. John Leland, a friend of Wyatt’s youth, later wrote: ‘The English tongue was rude, its verses vile/Now, skilful Wyatt, it has known your file.’ The only blot on Wyatt’s record was his marriage to the daughter of a Kentish baron, Elizabeth Brooke. We do ...”

“... products of nature rather than art. Artifice was often required to create these sensual paradises: John Evelyn, at the end of the 17th century, describes how to make what he calls a ‘Phonotactic Cylinder, or giant musical box’, which used water to produce sounds similar to birdsong (the alternative was to have an aviary). The synaesthetic delights of ...”

“... also looked after his father’s jobs in Cambridge, probably including the grand new chapel for St John’s College. Then, suddenly, according to Stamp, ‘some of his old Eton friends persuaded him to enter the University.’ At 24, his was a mature admission. He graduated top of the Moral Sciences Tripos for 1866. Next, he won a prize for an essay on ‘The ...”

“... have been inferences based on intuitions, in particular the intuition that certain sentences (‘John speaks fluently English’), though understandable, are nonetheless ‘in some way bad’, as Neil Smith and Nicholas Allott put it in their study of Chomsky, and that the ability to sense this badness is innate. Another piece of evidence for innateness, on ...”