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“... viewed with dismay the lack of restraint and caution in O’Donovan Rossa’s violent rhetoric. John Devoy, one of the leaders of Clan na Gael, the main Irish nationalist organisation in America, believed, as Kenna writes, that O’Donovan Rossa ‘had given the British ample warning of his plans through a desire for notoriety and theatricality, thus ...”

“... 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 candidate. And, generally, that’s what they have been getting and ...”

“... the ostentatious solemnity one finds in the liturgical minimalism of composers like Arvo Pärt and John Tavener. The Messiaen ‘cathedral’, if not exactly ecumenical, is vast, with plenty of room in the nave – as Edward Said noted – for ‘staunch secularists like myself’. The sixth movement of Vingt Regards, a turbulent fugue, is called ‘Par Lui ...”

“... caught any of Alan Bennett’s Westminster Abbey footage? Bennett, required to audition for the John Betjeman slot, couldn’t bring himself to deliver much more than formulaic world-weariness, a drone like a miraculously articulate David Hockney impersonator. Jonathan Meades does this schtick so much better, performs himself with lip-smacking ...”

“... the private sector sets aside for corporate sheen, although it does have a museum dedicated to John Charnley, who, almost half a century ago, pioneered the popular benchmark of the NHS’s success or failure, the hip replacement operation. They still do hips at Wrightington, and knees, and elbows, and shoulders. They deal with joint problems that are too ...”

“... too little and too lately known,’ Dryden wrote in a pompous, self-serving poem prefixed to John Oldham’s Remains in Verse and Prose (1684). Oldham had died of smallpox the previous December, at the age of 30, at the house of the Earl of Kingston, a young nobleman who had recently become his patron. He left behind a large body of work, now available ...”

“... But his camera plays an ambiguous game, in two stages. First of all it withholds the full sight of John Merrick (John Hurt), tantalising the audience with reaction shots, glimpses, a silhouette against a screen. The viewer’s appetite for freakishness is played with, worked up and then strangely shamed. After Lynch has ...”

“... favourable. Climbing without supplementary oxygen (pioneered by First World War bomber pilots) Major Edward Norton of the British Army and a London surgeon, Howard Somervell, got to 28,126 feet, less than 900 feet below the summit, at which height the atmosphere holds only a third of the oxygen we breathe at sea level. Four days later Mallory, who was ...”

“... Smithers calls his gloomy analysis ‘Japan as a Laboratory for Economic Theory’ because no major economy has ever run up such an extraordinary peacetime debt, or had so few ideas about how to ease its burden.Last year, the 171-year-old Sogo Department Store, Tokyo’s Bloomingdale’s, closed its doors well before Japan’s heavily commercialised ...”

“... musical training at an age when Berlioz had never used a piano or heard an orchestra. According to John Deathridge, Wagner wanted posterity to view him as an autodidact; but this claim should not be taken, as it apparently is by Cairns, at face value. He is right, of course, that Berlioz’s early years were not wasted for they contributed indispensable ...”

“... favourite producers and directors (David Puttnam, Richard Attenborough, Hugh Hudson, Roland Joffe, John Boorman) and its financial supporters. Shadowing the whole business, of course, is the dubious issue of the revival of the British film industry, for which Goldcrest had to bear all the hopes and finally, unfairly, carry the can. Terry Ilott’s conclusions ...”

“... aspires to a sharing – if not an invasion – of other people’s privacy. More than any other major contemporary writer, she remains loyal to the social mission that a 19th-century realist such as George Eliot professed. But both she and J.M. Coetzee confront the situation of present-day South Africa in which, under the National Party and its possible ...”

“... far more interestingly, as a dense and far-ranging discussion of knowledge, and as the source of major epistemological issues and debates from the Hellenistic period to modern times. Burnyeat sees the function of his Introduction as being that of encouraging the reader to find in the first dialogue, Socrates’s dialogue with Theaetetus, the spur to a second ...”

“... productive and interesting personnel with those of others excluded from attention. The book’s major strength, which ought to have been capitalised upon to a greater extent, is its use of the personal testimony of élite gardeners culled mainly from the various gardening magazines. This is turned to good use in many places, particularly in the discussion ...”

“... chip.’ Wilson had little to say about the pencil: what it achieved was too ephemeral. Nor did John Middleton Murry in his book called Pencillings, where despite his title, he left the pencil alone: instead, he included one chapter on ‘The Golden Pen’. It was left to Nabokov to produce an alternative view of the writer’s contribution to history from ...”