“... study, Unlikely Warriors: The British in the Spanish Civil War and the Struggle against Fascism. John Bassett, who served in the International Brigades for nine months, from March 1938 until they were disbanded that December, articulates the last-great-cause attitude better than anyone: ‘Never again will men of every creed and tongue go to war with the ...”

“... barn-like structure, set – in 1952 at least – in several acres of woodland. Water Music by John Cage, a Californian composer whose recent work had been feted in New York, opened the programme and baffled its audience. It involved Tudor performing various actions at seemingly random intervals: blowing a duck-call, tuning a radio, shuffling and dealing ...”

“... 9.1), cleansing lepers (Matthew 8.1-4), feeding thousands (Luke 9.10-17) and raising the dead (John 11.1-43), but I never quite managed any of those, and had to make do with speaking in tongues (Acts 2.4), having visions (Acts 2.17) and receiving words of wisdom (1 Corinthians 12.8) instead.* I was 17 years old when I started. I was from Essex. I’d ...”

“... William Ansah Sessarakoo’s​ father, John Corrantee of Annamaboe, on the Gold Coast, was a member of the Fante ruling family and a prominent merchant, well known in the interior and among European slave traders. In order to strengthen ties with his European business partners, and to give his heirs an advantage over their countrymen, Corrantee sent one of his sons to be educated in France and another – Sessarakoo – in England ...”

“... accounts of his life. Early Protestant accounts were more conflicted. In his ‘Book of Martyrs’ John Foxe was torn between describing More the humanist poet and More the lord chancellor who brought godly reformers to trial; in the end the persecutor won out. Saint or sinner, scholar or polemicist, philosopher or politician – no single vision of More has ...”

“... and forth as Colin Martin and Geoffrey Parker do in The Spanish Armada. The first page shows Sir John Hawkins writing a dispatch to Walsingham dated from on board the Victory in the North Sea on 10 August 1588. Somewhere to leeward, in spite of the fierce running battle of Gravelines two days before, there were still great bodies of disciplined Spanish ...”

“... moments in the history of American airtime. Elvis Presley’s top half on the Ed Sullivan Show; John F. Kennedy’s live debate with a melting Richard Nixon; an early episode of I Love Lucy; a dinner-table scene from The Waltons; Neil Armstrong’s One Small Step; the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald; the pilot show of Roseanne. Each viewer wore ...”

“... Sally’) and Ezra Pound, who was indicted for broadcasting from Italy; in Britain, John Amery and P.G. Wodehouse, who was cold-shouldered for giving a jaunty talk about life in his internment camp. Lord Haw-Haw was the most notorious radio traitor of all, and many British people, in the charged atmosphere of the postwar months, seemed ...”

“... fare. It was true that Don Juan was little understood ‘just now’. His once loyal publisher, John Murray, had backed out after the first five cantos, and the leading periodicals of the time refused on principle to review any of its instalments. (‘We knew not any severity of criticism which could reach the faults or purify the taste of Don Juan,’ the ...”

“... peglegs: all press-ganged upstream with Adam Dalgleish’s impersonator, Roy Marsden, for the Long John Silver show at the Mermaid. James is left with a heritage trail of selective quotations, a London Dungeon of waxwork crimes exhibited in authentic locations. This is an empty set, a set defined by its architecture (where even Mandy the Temp, in her ...”

“... poem associated with Rochester, ‘Upon Nothing’. One is written in the hand of his steward, John Cary, the other in a scribal hand. The second has been meticulously corrected from the first by Lady Rochester, who does not however correct the ascription of three stanzas of the poem to ‘Dux Bucks’ and three more to ‘Fleetwood Shepherd’. Harold ...”

“... disguise an essential seediness. It is noted by his first biographer, William Cooke, that he ‘took snuff in such quantities as often rendered him a very slovenly beau’. Variously called the ‘Hogarth of the stage’ and the ‘English Aristophanes’ – in both cases rather flatteringly – Foote included among his fans Dr Johnson (‘For a broad ...”

“... poetry; had been anointed as the diabolic successor to Aleister Crowley; had nearly interested John Betjeman in socialism and A.J.P. Taylor in incense. But he was one of those modernists who could only have been formed by an observance of tradition: he needed an anchor as much as he wanted a sailor. I only knew him at the fag-end of his career, when the ...”

“... Lindsay Anderson lives in a flat in one of the redbrick turn-of-the-century blocks behind John Barnes in Swiss Cottage. With its solid turreted houses, backing on gardens, Can-field, Compayne, Aberdare, Broadhurst, it’s the haunt of refugees, and Jewish old ladies, and perhaps (Lindsay would strike out that ‘perhaps’) the most European bit of ...”

“... standards, is the equivalent of Edward Jenner’s first trials of vaccination. In May 1796, he took material from a pustule on the hand of Sarah Nelmes, a dairymaid who had cowpox, and placed that fluid on incisions made in the arm of James Phipps. A later attempt to inoculate Phipps with smallpox failed. The comparison with HIV not as ludicrous as it may ...”