“... have been so alert to the medium’s cool tricking of the real and the abstract. Badlands may be the most serene film he ever made. A philosopher might have stopped then and there. But he was tickled by the idea of life as a moviemaker.His next film, Days of Heaven (1978), was more flagrantly beautiful and even more widely admired. It’s the story of ...”

“... after the conquest was painful to relate. In 1855, the philologist and later archbishop of Dublin Richard Chenevix Trench frightened an audience of schoolboys with the story of the deliberate perversion of the language by the French: he accused them of drawing ‘a secret satisfaction, a conscious sense of superiority, in thus stripping the language of its ...”

“... of the convictions of the Guildford Four and the Maguires resulted in the appointment of Sir John May’s inquiry, which was in part stalled by the prosecution of four of the police officers involved in the case. But when in 1991, piling Pelion on Ossa, the Court of Appeal overturned the convictions of the Birmingham Six, the Government was ready the same day ...”

“... More generally, there is the literature on the corruption of the innocent which takes its cue from Richard Hoggart’s Uses of Literacy and which is apt to picture every form of mass consumption as degenerate. Here – as in the writings of Jeremy Seabrook – it is the prosperity of the working class, rather than, or as well as, the poverty, which is the ...”

“... atheist denying a dying or dead Catholic the consolations of religion. Coming away I see Richard Ingrams, swathed in a black anorak, trudging along the pavement. He has a brief word with Fr Cunningham, much as, one feels, Oxford dons used to have with the train driver at Paddington when he’d brought the Cathedrals Express in on time. 15 April. In ...”

“... one. By all accounts he was very good at it. The final national servicemen were demobilised in May 1963, just a few days before Profumo confessed to the House of Commons that he had lied about the nature of his relationship with Christine Keeler. After Profumo’s resignation, there were two further, short-lived secretaries of state for war (Joseph Godber ...”

“... made its initial move from exteriority to interiority doesn’t much concern Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman. Their book is an essay on the ‘historical construction and the political uses of trauma’ and a report on anthropological fieldwork aimed at ‘denaturalising’ it and ‘repoliticising victims’. Working in a Foucauldian tradition, they ...”

“... recording of ‘God Save the King’ and other patriotic anthems. ‘Not surprisingly’, Richard Weight remarks in Patriots, the convoy ‘got a muted reception when it parked in the ruins of Berlin’. In France, the bus crews were treated to mayoral banquets, only for their leader to complain about the ‘strange dishes’ which weren’t ‘up to ...”

“... deepened, the face was captured by some remarkable photographers, including Cecil Beaton, Richard Avedon and Jane Bown, and a string of artists. The vigorous scribble of Feliks Topolski naturally found him a good subject, as did the heroic sculptural instincts of Henry Moore, who drew Auden’s skin from memory on hearing of his death – ‘the ...”

“... and Memoirs – had covers easily recognisable as ‘SF art’. The jackets were designed by Richard Powers, whose unmistakable paintings were usually found on Ballantine mass-market paperbacks by Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl, Clifford Simak and others. Powers’s designs screamed of the ‘paraliterary’, of druggy, trippy, sci-fi – just the boy’s ...”

“... Man Out of His Humour; Humfrey King, the poetic tobacconist; the barber-surgeons Tom Tooley and Richard Lichfield; the tavern joker John Stone. These loquacious oddballs found a small economic niche as ad hoc entertainers; they are haunters of St Paul’s Churchyard and the Inns of Court, of revels and convivia. We have no first-hand record of a Coryate ...”

“... year his blind daughter, Mary, was born – and suffered from a series of nervous illnesses which Richard Greaves unhelpfully approaches by means of psychiatric theory and William Styron’s compelling account of his own severe depression. In 1650 Bunyan had heard three or four women discussing religion: they were, he said, ‘far above out of my ...”

“... it was very unwarrantable) that the Mobile had.’ Memories of popular action in the 1640s may well explain the desire in 1688-9 to get a king safely on the throne as quickly as possible. Laura Stevenson O’Connell writes on ‘The Elizabethan Bourgeois Hero-Tale’. ‘Bourgeois’ is a daring word to use in a Hexter festschrift, and Ms O’Connell ...”

“... under any other act, then the coroner must hold an inquest as soon as it is practicable. A jury may or may not be summoned, but either way the inquest must decide, first, who the deceased was; and second, how, when and where they came by their death. In the past, inquests used to engage with far wider questions, often ...”

“... led to his banishment; Jonson in due course drew on this in his Poetaster. Moreover, Ovid himself may have been conscious of an element of formal or literary transgression in his work. He refers to the ever-flowing stream of his poem as carmen perpetuum, ‘perpetual song’. This is likely to be a deliberate, arrogant inversion of the canon laid down by his ...”