“... called Not Playing for Celtic: Another Paradise Lost, and, yes, the paradise in question is indeed John Milton’s – or Big John’s (as he is called here):    Beating Airdrie in this year’s final has hardly sent warning shock-waves reverberating around the football giants of Europe, but having witnessed the ...”

“... reads: ‘From here on in, everything in this scene is frantic, like a documentary in an emergency ward, with the big difference here being nobody knows what the fuck they’re doing.’ Reservoir Dogs, directed by Tarantino and released in 1992, is all about a botched diamond heist, and how arch-criminals are chronically unable to spot the cop in their ...”

“... early poems, sometimes converting them to an inappropriate modern harshness; nobody seems to like John Crowe Ransom’s reworkings; and Auden’s revisions and exclusions sometimes seem petulant or even perverse, as if he had decided not to understand his own poems. Since the original versions remain accessible this is not a matter of high ...”

“... a glamorous young aristocrat (he was 19 when Venus and Adonis appeared) who was also the ward of William Cecil, Lord Burghley. This is the way ambitious Elizabethan poets got on in the world: they found a generous aristocratic patron, whose taste, praised in a lavish dedication, in turn constituted a marketable endorsement. That this worked for ...”

“... with the ‘time of old sin’ – whether a fantastical Alma-Tadema-ish Ancient Rome, or a John Addington Symonds Athens, where pederasty was not merely permissible but praiseworthy – drifted, for those who survived their heady youth of Baudelaire and absinthe, into the Aesthetes’ religion, in which chalices and smoke played their part. ...”

“... The engraved frontispiece​ to the 1635 second edition of John Donne’s Poems features a portrait of the artist as an exceedingly young man. Eighteen years old, in loose curls, padded Italian doublet, a single cross-shaped earring and the optimistic hint of a moustache, Donne clutches an oversized sword by the hilt and gazes sidelong at the viewer from beneath provocatively arched brows, a study in adolescent bravado ...”

“... he became an Idealist is a notable example. Having been persuaded by his tutor James Ward that the metaphysics of Idealism turned on the validity of the ontological argument, he was, so the story goes, in the middle of writing a paper for Ward criticising Descartes’s version of the ontological argument when ...”

“... share with fairy tales what Angela Carter described as an ‘unperplexedness’, later glossed by John Bayley as meaning that the story ‘knows what it is doing and where it is going, but neither knows nor cares what it means’. This is quick-fire fiction: the telling of the tale is all, and it should be as fast and efficient as possible. ‘When I started ...”

“... In 1975 Colin Ward described Spitalfields as a classic inner-city ‘zone of transition’. Bordering on the City of London, the place had traditionally been a densely-populated ‘service centre for the metropolis’ where wave after wave of immigrants struggled to gain a foothold on the urban economy: Huguenot silk weavers, the Irish who were set to work undercutting them, Jewish refugees from late 19th-century pogroms in East Europe, and the Bengalis who have settled in the area since the 1950s ...”

“... The Thorndike laboratory became a model for establishing a working liaison between laboratory and ward. It was in the mid-1930s that the great gunturret of scientific medicine swung round to train upon infectious disease. If treatment could be started early enough in the course of the disease, Ehrlich’s neoarsphenamine was effective in the treatment of ...”

“... mechanism of a phenomenon is very different from being able to mitigate its impact. The physicist John Tyndall identified the greenhouse effect in 1860, but generations of scientists have failed to instigate reforms that might slow it down. Perhaps it would be better to focus not on explaining the science, but on exposing the political and industrial ...”

“... arrangements Australia had inherited. Above all, in the minds of such conservatives as John Howard, it was designed to maximise Anglo-Australia’s guilt for what happened to the Aborigines; something for which late 20th-century Australians could not be held responsible. This was the ‘black armband’ school of history, a phrase ...”

“... not only strengthen ties of friendship but weaken the infatuation felt by his son for Mrs Dudley Ward. This cure for love called for the services of the battle cruiser Renown, which used 35,798 tons of fuel oil on the Australia-New Zealand tour alone, with India, the Far East and Japan still to come. Mountbatten, then 19, went along to jolly the difficult ...”

“... and others merely succumbed to in ignorance, costs both human and material were being counted by John Maynard Keynes, who agonised about working for a government he despised ‘for ends I think criminal’. The war had, indeed, fast become an increasingly disreputable enterprise which with every discarded corpse raised the stakes of peace. Blinded by the ...”

“... In the polarised atmosphere of George III’s reign, a host of political clubs took root. John Wilkes’s success in mobilising antigovernment sentiment during the 1760s owed much to a battery of radical associations, including the Anti-Gallican, Beefsteak and Albion clubs, and the masonic lodges. From the 1790s the Society for Constitutional ...”