“... It is an image that has inspired varied imaginative treatment down to our own times, in films like John Boorman’s vulgar and energetic epic Excalibur or Bresson’s stark, pessimistic Lancelot du Lac. It is rumoured that Jancso is now preparing a film, inspired by the work of Georges Duby, of the great clash of knights at Bouvines (1214), one of the few ...”

“... all we can to protect. Get your third jab.3 DecemberListen to Rupert Beale discuss this piece with John Lanchester and Thomas Jones on the LRB ...”

“... Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers, a law and order manifesto for a very nasty party. If Tom Jones had encountered this Fielding in his rambles round Britain, a longish novel would have become a short story. Tom’s sexual transgressions were matters for the ecclesiastical courts, but he was a poacher, an idler unwilling to earn his living by regular ...”

“... gramophone records of Rumanian church music on the table, next to a pile of prayers composed by John Donne (who also preached at St Dunstan’s). This sturdy English church is encircled with chapels for several of the independent Churches which are in communion with the Church of England, Coptic and Ethiopian, Polish (with a figure of the redoubtable Black ...”

“... Everyone​knows that Mervyn Griffith-Jones QC asked an Old Bailey jury in 1960 whether Lady Chatterley’s Lover was a book they would want their wives or servants to read. The jury – which included three women – is said to have laughed. Its acquittal of Penguin on a charge of violating the newly minted Obscene Publications Act 1959 is widely regarded as a turning point in the centuries-long persecution of literature and philosophy in the name of morality ...”

“... out into the green and pleasant suburbs. All of this changed over the following two decades.As John Davis points out, the idea that London started to ‘swing’ in the 1960s was largely the concoction of journalists in need of a story, most of them American. But in Soho and on the King’s Road in Chelsea, ideas were taking shape that would eventually ...”

“... narrative has a touch of Croucher’s self-righteousness, his low-Tory snobbishness and John Bull bloodiness. Tony, declares the author (unashamedly the God’s-eye narrator), ‘had been an archetypal shit, but the affair with Chloe had discovered in him dangerous virtues. Thoughtfulness, a degree of constancy, even patience itself.’ Salaman ...”

“... big event (and even the Serie A game between Roma and Inter postponed to the following day). Pope John Paul II is to celebrate a televised mass in St Peter’s, and then travel down to San Giovanni Rotondo to celebrate Mass there. The millions of pellegrini in attendance are to be transported by more than five thousand coaches (100 from Poland alone) and 19 ...”

“... Dorothy Wordsworth makes it clear whose eyes her own journal is for, after William and his brother John had left her in Trasmere, and set off to walk into Yorkshire, ‘cold pork in their pockets’: ‘I resolved to write a journal of the time till W and J return, and I set about keeping my resolve, because I will not quarrel with myself, and because I shall ...”

“... for a reference for a gamekeeper. The magazine sort of launched me on a career, because Alan Pryce-Jones, who was then the editor of the TLS, gave me a lot of reviewing work. AH: How did you see your future then? FW: I suppose I feebly wanted to be a writer, but, apart from those stories, I couldn’t think what on earth I was going to do. I got my first job ...”

“... Industrialists, bankers, rich Tories of every description felt that the day of doom was nigh. John Davies, Secretary of State for Industry in the Tory Government and a former Director-General of the CBI, called his children round the hearth to tell them this was the last Christmas of its kind they would be enjoying together. Tony Benn, his planning ...”

“... It was very unfair to those young men.’ John Henry Newman’s conversion to the Roman Catholic Church in 1845 shattered the intellectual credit of the Oxford Movement. The long struggle – first from the pulpit of the University Church of St Mary, later through the radical pages of Tracts for the Times – to state the case for the Apostolic authority of the Anglican church had ended, as the Movement’s critics had always predicted, in total surrender to Catholic dogma ...”

“... so is familiar with the ‘Blue Hotel’, the police headquarters in Johannesburg otherwise called John Vorster Square. And then a black man fell out of the sky. He came flying through a fifth floor window, landed at our feet in a spray of glass, and lay there like an upturned tortoise, feebly waving his arms in the air. I ran over and knelt beside him, but I ...”

“... might fantasise about what it was like, but to go further was dangerous. In 1318, a man called John, perhaps the son of an Exeter tanner, appeared at Oxford’s north gate claiming that he was the rightful king of England. John said that he was Edward I’s true first-born son, swapped out in the cradle by a negligent ...”

“... time to be a gay man anywhere, let alone here.The play being cast and rehearsed is an odd choice: John Herbert’s Fortune and Men’s Eyes, first staged in 1967 and adapted for film in 1971. It’s set in a prison and shows the power structure that establishes itself in a world without women, and the degradation that follows. To choose this text to be ...”