“... civil religion. O’Brien’s Jefferson presides as high priest of a reified ‘Cult of the French Revolution’. This approach turns out to be timely. O’Brien records that when Timothy McVeigh was arrested on the day of the Oklahoma City bombing, he wore a T-shirt bearing the words of Jefferson: ‘The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to ...”

“... an extract from Wesker’s The Kitchen. Less emblematic but equally germane is the story, told in Philip Hoare’s 1995 biography, of Coward’s visit to the Court to see David Storey’s grittily realistic Rugby League play The Changing Room. His attention having been drawn to the male genitalia on display in the bath scene, Coward remarked: ‘13 acorns are ...”

“... They Fall – Bogart’s final film – and after a moment growls ‘Bogie’ in American-accented French. Before I viewed that breathless moment, I was too young to have seen or wanted to see an actual Bogart movie, and not enough time had yet passed for Bogart to become an emblem of another period. After A bout de souffle, I went to all the NFT’s regular ...”

“... never commanded so much as a battalion in the field. He was selected partly because he could speak French, just as his French opposite Saint-Arnaud had been chosen by Napoleon III because he had fluent English. Unfortunately, Saint-Arnaud also had terminal cancer, which was to bring his colourful life to an end shortly after ...”

“... think that of most others in this branch of the profession. I come across, say, a letter from a French Ambassador in London in April 1583, where he remarks that there is about to occur a ‘great conjunction’ of Jupiter and Saturn in the sign of Aries, something that happens once every seven hundred and sixty years or so and heralds some frightful ...”

“... to put you in the presence of a person, not a picture. It was probably Gainsborough’s friend Philip Thicknesse who wrote that his ‘pictures may not be said so properly to be like the originals as to be the people themselves’, and similar remarks were made about La Tour’s pastels. The critical language would be equally appropriate for a piece of ...”

“... often taken parodic form (the soup cans of Andy Warhol, the deliberate kitsch of architects like Philip Venturi, author of the feisty manifesto Learning from Las Vegas) is now itself parodied in Gilbert Adair’s funny and accomplished second novel. The narrator of Love and Death on Long Island is the Hampstead-inhabiting author of four novels more popular ...”

“... go through that again.’ In his Passchendaele, which marks the 70th anniversary of that occasion, Philip Warner argues that the worst feature of the battle was that it so ‘disheartened the democracies’ that they ‘became less willing to preserve peace by preparing for war’. Yet in the military context of the day the attempt to enlarge the Ypres Salient ...”

“... Wars. His first four novels, which explored and extended the bounds of sci-fi, owe a large debt to Philip K. Dick. Lethem even sold the author’s estate ‘a few dozen’ paperback copies of out-of-print titles they didn’t have, so that the executor could seek their republication. ‘Vulcan’s Hammer, in other words, is sort of my fault,’ Lethem once ...”

“... he adulated, had at the end of his life thought about writing a drama on the subject of ‘The French Police’. Bulwer-Lytton’s family loved Paris – his brother Sir Henry Bulwer, who was the inspiration of George Sand’s Mauprat, in 1834 published sketches of Parisian life which have the verve of Balzac – and his conception of Newgate fiction was ...”

“... In February 1976 Hilton Kramer gave his approval to Philip Pearlstein’s ‘remorseless articulation of the authentic’. In November of the following year he alerted his readers to the absence, in the art of David Hockney, of ‘the spiritual quest at the heart of modernism’. Several years later, in June 1981, he gave warning that the stained canvases of Morris Louis, the leading member of the ‘Washington Colour School’, did not represent the breakthrough that other critics had announced ...”

“... San Francisco on 7 October 1955. Michael McClure who also read that night along with Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen and Philip Lamantia, describes the poem’s impact in Scratching the Beat Surface (1982): I hadn’t seen Allen in a few weeks and I had not heard Howl – it was new to me. Allen began in a small and intensely ...”

“... he grew delirious. News of his illness spread: prayers and fasts were organised and his father, Philip II of Spain, arrived at his bedside with physicians, nobles and prelates in tow. The doctors applied ointments and poultices and gave him strong purgatives. But after weeks of debate they decided to trepan his skull in order to relieve the pressure from ...”

“... for the scholar sufficiently rigorous in his principles. The more sceptical British bibliographer, Philip Gaskell, undermines this monist doctrine in From Writer to Reader (1978), where with self-conscious editorial quixotism he sets out to ‘establish’ the text of Stoppard’s Travesties. Using the playwright’s working script, various rehearsal and stage ...”

“... the Byronic hero, Julian, more romantically alive on the page. Julian is distantly modelled on Sir Philip Sidney but is based more immediately on Vita’s ideal version of herself. Violet suggested a detailed description of Julian’s appearance. ‘“Julian was tall,” let us say and “flawlessly proportioned”,’ she wrote to Vita on 5 June ...”