“... best room in an overbooked hotel. In Poland for the papal visit in 1991, he’s so moved by John Paul II’s demeanour, conducting a six-hour open-air ceremony, that he seems to get close to re-conversion. ‘There was something about the singing, the colours and the beauty of the words which reminded me of strange, hard-won moments of pure contentment I had ...”

“... the Madison suite of Sacha’s Hotel in Manchester (motto: ‘Sacha’s Only Looks Expensive’), Paul Williams recalls an unrewarding encounter with Bob Dylan: ‘But I shook his hand which was ... and this was at the beginning of the tour ... and things changed significantly during the tour ... he became more sociable, I’ve been talking to a number of ...”

“... are. Realism can refer to the representational mode of an art form, or to its cognitive effect. Paul Murray quotes me in this book as claiming that the Irish literary tradition is one of ‘largely non-realistic works’, whereas what I actually wrote was ‘non-realist’. ‘Realistic’ is a value term, whereas ‘realist’ is not, or not ...”

“... early bath, or shampoo. I don’t want to make too much of this hair thing. After all, there was a foot thing, too. Lots of players turned out in funny-coloured boots. I suppose hair and footwear are the only bits of themselves footballers can get to decorate without first securing permission from Fifa, or Adidas, or Nike. Metal attachments ...”

“... order – by means of careful technological description, albeit in images rather than text. As Paul Binski put it in Gothic Sculpture, to the medieval mind both ‘natural and crafted things’ were ‘fashioned from primary matter, the matter of the cosmos’. God is the master crafter, who, in the frontispiece of 13th-century Bibles moralisées, such as ...”

“... Baghdadi is little more than a front man for Baathist officers operating behind the scenes. For Paul Rogers, violent jihadism is a symptom first and foremost of global inequality, a revolt from the margins by people who see no evidence that increases in total global wealth are a benefit to them. On the contrary, improvements in education and mass ...”

“... The Bible is by Christopher Fry, or for Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ by Paul Schrader. Pasolini hasn’t really written this movie, he has made excerpts from the gospel and filmed them, either as images in the manner we have just looked at, or with images, in the style of much of the rest of the film. What happens next in the opening ...”

“... Nike Town, with its spiralling floors of merchandise rising around an atrium (dominated by a 200-foot video screen that beams out adverts), is not a store built to make money – it doesn’t pack enough luxury items per square foot. Instead, as the practitioners of entertainment architecture like to say, it exists to tell ...”

“... mean many things: that someone’s father, perennially out of work for ‘kicking with the wrong foot’, has managed to find a job; that the pop group Mud has gone to number one with ‘Oh Boy’; or, more likely, that there’s been a murder, a beating, a car bomb, a riot, a high-profile trial. ‘A booby-trap bomb that was intended for a British army ...”

“... tales of national identity and tradition, and not enough to the insights of those who stand one foot in, one foot out, in particular those with the ambivalent perspective of the once colonised. If it’s never too late to learn, then there should be a rush to the works of Paul Gilroy on ...”

“... And from the same publisher comes the first full-length study of Oakeshott’s political thought. Paul Franco has produced a fair, readable and clear account of one of the best, if one of the most tantalisingly elusive, of English political theorists. Because he is concerned, perhaps rightly, to stress the consistency of Oakeshott’s political thought, and ...”

“... Artaud, you become dependent on the past if only because you need to have it around to reject. As Paul de Man observed in his subtle essay ‘Literary History and Literary Modernity’, ‘the more radical the rejection of anything that came before, the greater the dependence on the past.’* What blurs these continuities is the fact that in the natural ...”

“... most cruelly answered.Reviewing Seamus Heaney and Craig Raine in these columns (1 November 1984), Paul Muldoon insisted that Heaney’s real strength lay in the short lyric (innocently singling out for special praise ‘Widgeon’ – a poem dedicated to and ventriloquised upon Muldoon himself), and he reminded Raine that a sustained metaphor or conceit ...”

“... as his art matures. The Life and Loves of a She-Devil also has arson in it. Ruth, who is six foot two inches tall and very plain, is displeased with her husband, Bobbo, because he has taken to going to bed with Mary, who is small and pretty and a successful writer of romantic fiction. Matters bubble up at a family dinner party: ‘Nicola kicked the ...”

“... piece was by the Polish composer Henryk Gorecki and the words were the personal motto Pope John Paul II had adopted, by which he expressed his intense love of Mary. The piece was composed in 1987 to celebrate the pope’s third visit to his native country and to the national shrine of Our Lady of Czestochowa. The association spoiled the pleasure the music ...”