“... for New Society, a violence pundit. He got everything that was coming to him: he was played by Roger Daltrey. But the real clincher, as far as Reg was concerned, came with the last rites for his mother Violet. ‘Last but not least, when he attended my mother’s funeral in the role of reporter, he did not wear a tie. He was never a true villain.’ The ...”

“... Pearse himself: he had suggested inviting Prince Joachim, younger son of Kaiser Wilhelm II, to be King of Ireland. It is fascinating to think that German might now be one of Ireland’s official languages, along with English and Irish. How complicated are the affairs of even the smallest nations. Roy Foster is one of the finest contemporary Irish ...”

“... Cavell regarded this scepticism as internal to Wittgenstein, and it is why he didn’t follow the Roger Scrutons of the world in regarding a ‘form of life’ as a set of codes embedded in a culture which enable human understanding through being both shared and more or less unalterable, and which might therefore justify the conservation of even apparently ...”

“... of mental sloth or moral vacuity,’ opined the anonymous author of the Telegraph obituary. Roger Scruton in his memorial service valedictory saw Fuller’s intellectual life as growth towards a maturity into which he had just entered, a movement towards the familiar shape of right thinking. This was not the Peter Fuller I knew and still miss ...”

“... he was a supplier of headgear à la mode to an upmarket clientele which had at one time included King James’s fashion-mad consort, Queen Anne, and he was – not least – a familiar acquaintance of Shakespeare. A rather respectable figure, it may seem from this summary, an immigrant success story, though there is also some evidence to suggest ...”

“... Aitken and Simon Cowell. On a number of occasions, she connects Joyce’s case with that of Roger Casement, another Irishman hanged for treason in Britain during a world war. The comparison is, to put it mildly, flattering to Joyce, who had a notable effect as a propagandist, but did nothing to earn anybody’s lasting respect. His childhood years in ...”

“... person on their list, the administrators quickly found a replacement … The Antagonist, the great King of Delusion, curled up into a writhing homunculus the size of an ant, & fell raging through a crack in a dried-out cow-clap. Heaney did not listen for long. Fast-forward to 1996 and we find him complaining that ‘the thing is out of control … I’m a ...”

“... is unknowable, but Brindle offers a counterfactual hint in his account of the chapel of King’s College, Cambridge. The Perpendicular fan vaulting of the master mason John Wastell sits in harmony with later Flemish stained glass and French wood carving, embellished with classical motifs. It is Gothic going on Renaissance. Instead, cut off from ...”

“... interest, studiously examining the backgrounds of Ceasar and Cleopatra, Saint Joan, and In Good King Charles’s Golden Days, and extending the discussion to many other plays. He looks for the roots of Shaw’s thinking about history in Carlyle, Macaulay, Nietzsche, Buckle, Marx and others, including John Stuart Stuart-Glennie, a philosopher of history ...”

“... one month and I was not able to read the third. I also read some Eurocommunist writings, books by Roger Garaudy, Cohen’s biography of Bukharin and some copies of New Left Review. R.B.: Why do these questions of Soviet history loom so large in contemporary life? B.K.: In the West things happen very quickly. Before Thatcher or Reagan seems a long time ...”

“... been playing, with, responsible for their suppression, the commissioner of police for Bruges, one Roger de Bris. This gives quiet pleasure as it’s also the name of the transvestite stage director in Mel Brooks’s The Producers, who makes his appearance bare-shouldered and in a heavy ball gown. 7 March. Our pillar box is now emptied at 9 a.m. not by the ...”

“... An epigraph to the screenplay of True Romance, attributed to ‘French critics on the films of Roger Corman’, says: ‘His films are a desperate cry from the heart of a grotesque fast-food culture.’ In Tarantino the cry is not desperate, and his characters are capable of quoting this line as a joke. In Natural Born Killers a pretentious film director ...”

“... the document which was to prove the beginning of the end for any hope of autonomy. The French king agreed to recognise Haiti’s independence only if the new republic paid France an indemnity of 150 million francs and reduced its import and export taxes by half. The ‘debt’ that Haiti recognised was incurred by the slaves when they deprived the French ...”

“... end up toppling into the mud. Assassination tends to preserve reputations (Martin Luther King, Chico Mendes). Elected office can put the seal on a career or soil it for ever: for every Nelson Mandela, there is an Aung San Suu Kyi. Greta Thunberg at 16 is one thing, but it is hard to picture her going at it with the same intensity at 45. People get ...”

“... experience. Michael Tanner speaks of its ‘qualifications for religious status’; while for Roger Scruton, Tristan und Isolde offers nothing less than ‘a sacrificial consolation for the imperfect loves of those who witness it’.In the early days, the expressionistic intensity of Tristan und Isolde produced violent reactions in its audiences. The ...”