“... Fortune Theatre where I was appearing with my colleagues and co-writers Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller and Dudley Moore in Beyond the Fringe.It was a smash hit, with every night the audience studded with celebrities, and accordingly at one performance there was the queen. My particular tour de force in the second half was an Anglican sermon, which always ...”

“... taste’ of Magritte’s house in the Rue des Mimosas in suburban Brussels, Jonathan Miller took off into one of his self-intoxicating fantasies. We were there together in the mid-Sixties to make a film for the BBC, and although I had forewarned him, Jonathan couldn’t believe that this overstuffed furniture, this aviary of china birds, these ...”

“... work. Not long before he died, I interviewed one of Chicago’s Nobel laureates, Merton Miller, for work I’ve been doing on the impact on markets of modern financial economics. ‘Benoit had a great influence on a lot of us,’ Miller told me. In the early 1960s, Mandelbrot was already beginning to assemble a ...”

“... at Yale. The book offers, not an argued defence of their line – though Professor Hillis Miller does occasionally fall into something like argument between one fundamental assertion and the next – but rather five individual exhibitions of it in action. The exhibitions are not really open to the ordinary ‘reader’, however. The book is in the ...”

“... with the arts. Elizabeth David, friend of Norman Douglas, is eternalised in the lovely icon of John Ward’s drawing, the epitome of chic in her companionable kitchen. M.F.K. Fisher is just as beautiful. Her most beloved husband was a painter, and her books are so instinct with upmarket bohemianism that it is no surprise to find her in a cameo role in the ...”

“... rulers nothing. Elizabeth I, in spite of ‘la mauvaise opinion’ which she held of Geneva after John Knox had written his First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women there, found it convenient to mouth pious concern for her distressed co-religionists abroad; she was less ready to give them armies or subsidies. Charles I, profoundly ...”

“... situation now is very different. At the age of 78, and with the possible exception of John Adams, Glass can be regarded as the most famous – certainly the most successful – of all the composers who emerged from the minimalist revolution of the 1960s. Perhaps because he shed the technical apparatus of such iconic pieces as Reich’s Drumming ...”

“... far from home,’ she writes.Harris begins with Chaucer’s Reeve’s Tale, the story of Aleyn and John, two Cambridge students who get their revenge on a thieving miller by raping his wife and his daughter, Malyne. It was long considered an English take on the French fabliau, a genre known for witty stories of trickery and ...”

“... Hogg and Melville, as with Wordsworth, Keats, Mary Shelley, William Godwin or, for that matter, John Calvin, was not a puritan ‘state of mind’, but the sense of living and writing at the periphery of a dominant culture that had, nonetheless, become central to his or her life’s work. That sense of marginality arose in response to historical ...”

“... he had never seen a professional production. He had read no dramatic literature: no Williams, Miller, O’Neill, Chekhov, Ibsen. It was only when he moved with his white soon to be second wife, Judy Oliver, to her home town of St Paul in 1978 that his interest in playwrighting began in earnest. He wrote children’s plays on science-related subjects for ...”

“... 1946, only to be expelled by a reactionary faculty – he had dared to prefer Cézanne to Augustus John. Forced into national service for 18 slack months, he spent most of the time reading, Joyce above all, and Ulysses became the subject of a first suite of etchings; old media attracted him as much as new. ‘Hamilton was fascinated by the skill, the ...”

“... Howe; Lionel Trilling called it ‘reserved and beautifully realised’. Six years later Karl Miller found The Widow’s Children ‘a compelling and satisfying book’. All those endorsements, however, didn’t keep her novels from going out of print at the end of the decade (they were reprinted in the 1980s, but went out of print again). Then Jonathan ...”

“... individualism’. Hatch’s thesis is perhaps best exemplified by the Baptist preacher John Leland who, on New Year’s Day 1802, presented to the President, Thomas Jefferson, a 1235-pound cheese bearing the motto: ‘Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.’ When Leland spoke before the Houses of Congress, he was described by one Congressman ...”

“... has been part of the critical repertoire of other literary disciplines for several years: Nancy Miller’s Getting Personal (1991) is cited repeatedly throughout the book and there is plenty of new material of this kind in H. Aram Veeser’s collection, Confessions of the Critics (which also, broadmindedly, includes a spirited attack on this whole critical ...”

“... that the car had at last brought a major blood sport to Britain. His fellow poet and road-hog, John Masefield, also exulted as he traversed the Downs at furious speed, his Overland emitting ‘soul-animating strains’ (doubtless from a Gabriel horn). And the man who wrote to the motoring press urging drivers not to stop after an accident if they had a ...”