“... feel one still has to fight for the phallic reality ... So I wrote my novel, which I want to call John Thomas and Lady Jane ... It rather looks as if Witter Bynner was a good influence on Lawrence, as well as being a severe and witty critic. But then, to judge by these letters, he was a pretty good fellow all round. He seems to have fancied himself as a sort ...”

“... that men are sometimes wicked on purpose; Robert Kee, the hot-eyed public prosecutor … When John Birt arrived at the BBC as Deputy Director-General at the end of the 1980s, apocalyptic assessments of the programme were back in fashion. According to Birt, the BBC’s Chairman, Marmaduke Hussey, regarded Panorama as a microcosm of a BBC that was ‘out of ...”

“... Denis: ‘Marnie – wig, smell and all’; ‘Sam Smith, MP for Flint and religious bore’; ‘John Bulman, tutor, whisky lover and cheat’; ‘The misery of picnics’; ‘The Palship, dressed to kill ... ’ In triumphant contrast, there is: ‘Myself at 11, fisherman, child musicologist and budding atheist’. A Welsh Childhood is also strengthened by ...”

“... Early​ in the afternoon of 6 May 2010, the leading stock market index in the US, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, suddenly started falling. There was no evident external reason for the fall – no piece of news or economic data – but the market, which had been drifting slowly downwards that day, in a matter of minutes dropped by 6 per cent ...”

“... the 1790s (which included a letter from Elizabeth I thanking him for his ‘prettye Verses’) and John Payne Collier in the 1830s and 1840s (which showed Shakespeare to have been a well-connected member of metropolitan literary circles from an early stage). But for Shapiro the real villain is Edmond Malone. The usual story is that Malone, as he himself ...”

“... smelling powerfully of brandy. Seeing I was a bit dejected, Bruce said he would plug me with John Major and David (Young) ... I went to Brooks’s, lost £150 and my appetite waned. Returned here and ate a toasted bun, first food since a banana at 1.30. In the tea room I had a chat with Fallon, a nice cool whip. I complained about all this ...”

“... New Penny in Watford, the kids in their mother’s pussy-bow blouses were getting into what Dylan Jones calls ‘a decade of cultural deregulation’. ‘We all wanted to escape into something that wasn’t really there,’ says Marco Pirroni, one-time guitarist with Adam and the Ants. To begin with, it was a southern English thing, but it spread like a rash ...”

“... fact that you can tell, just by looking at it, that any sentence of the syntactic form P and Q (‘John swims and Mary drinks’, as it might be) is true only if P and Q are both true. ‘You can tell just by looking’ means: to see that the entailments hold, you don’t have to know anything about what either P or Q means and you don’t have to know ...”

“... by scholars whose main source was the Bible. (The evangelical adventurer and self-publicist John MacGregor found this a problem on a canoe trip down the Jordan in 1868.) Aspirant surveyors quickly discovered that they needed the co-operation of local tribal leaders, some of whom collaborated in the hope that it would encourage a British force to invade ...”

“... right. Having been told about the crime by people who did see it, they decide that it was indeed Jones, not Smith, who was responsible. Do the jury know that Jones was the villain? According to Plato, they cannot possibly know this – and not just because conditions in a court of law are not ideally suited to the ...”

“... was marked last year by the publication of a good biography, The Lives of Robert Ryan by J.R. Jones, and a retrospective series at Anthology Film Archives in New York, which screened a few of his films under the title ‘An Actor’s Actor’.* In his last years, Jones says, he got the delayed recognition of a plaque ...”

“... Joplin is alive. Jack Kerouac is alive. Jimi Hendrix is alive. Lyndon Johnson is alive. James Jones is alive. Jim Morrison and Robert Penn Warren are alive. Richard Nixon is dead; and a Soviet-bloc skier named Ivana Trump – someone overhears Sixties psychic Jeanne Dixon saying – will assign her name to a novel she does not write with the full and ...”

“... damage done to others was incidental, part of some larger story that wasn’t going to get told. John Wayne’s film The Green Berets (1968) told another story, but it didn’t tell that one. The cluster of new films about the Iraq War is different in both respects. The war is still going on – indeed has no visible end, in spite of what everyone wants and ...”

“... War. There were Kipling’s vivid stories of Sussex life through the ages, and then there was John Buchan’s The Path of the King, tracing ancestral virtues and vices from a Viking prince to Abraham Lincoln, taking in the depravities of Titus Oates. Even before reading these quite gripping books, we were vaguely acquainted, through schools, comics and ...”

“... or Kafka – the most ‘impressive’ names on his bookshelf are Isaac Asimov, Ursula Le Guin and John Wyndham – but at a village meeting to discuss what to do about a proposed Gypsy campsite, he reflects that ‘the villagers wanted the Gypsies to be gross, so the grossness of what they’re not acts as a stencil for what the villagers are.’ He has ...”