“... operations carried out by a motley crew of spooks. His depiction in the 1998 film Elizabeth as a gay godless politique has little foundation in fact, though the film did capture the obsessive concern with protecting the queen from assassination that so evidently animated him. Described by one 16th-century Spanish ambassador as blunt, uncourtly and dressed ...”

“... such as the Polish nobleman Jan Laski (John à Lasco) and the Italian Pietro Martire Vermigli (‘Peter Martyr’), both of whom rubbed off on Cranmer. One must turn back to A.G. Dickens and his pupil Bob Scribner for a more adequate and curious account of how Luther’s new theology was disseminated and of how it interacted with grassroots reforming ...”

“... he has secretly invested in McCoy’s securities firm, Pierce and Pierce. A sodden British hack, Peter Fallow, who works for the depraved newspaper City Light, is assigned to the case of the white assassin who is supposedly being protected by friends in high places. (One of the more mordant truths proclaimed by this novel is that in high places there are no ...”

“... a ‘legendary period in movies’. In The Last Picture Show, Welles’s friend and protégé Peter Bogdanovich had made ‘a film for everybody’. The Godfather was an ideal merging of ‘commerce and art’. Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets was ‘a triumph of personal filmmaking’ and a gripping thriller. For Sontag, these films were merely a case of ...”

“... Sontag magnetised the camera her entire career, a watchful muse and Medusa starer in portraits by Peter Hujar (whose photographs line the inside cover of Moser’s book like a wall of publicity stills), Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Robert Mapplethorpe, and, later, her partner Annie Leibovitz. Sontag’s post-cancer skunk-stripe hair made her instantly ...”

“... would have been a sex-ridden hag.’ Men who associate with such floozies are quite likely to be gay – a contemptible form of ‘nastiness’, in Marlowe’s view, though a drunken novelist later tells him it’s unwise to say so in print: ‘The queer is the artistic arbiter of our age, chum.’ Either way, it’s invariably men who provoke his strongest ...”

“... keep himself mysterious. (‘The first time I heard Neil Tennant describe the Pet Shop Boys as a gay band … I wished he hadn’t,’ Almond is quoted as saying in Jones’s book.) But time alters your sense of what risk really is. Soft Cell were pouting at the lads and their fads and their bigoted old dads. It turns out that the inheritors of punk were not ...”

“... of Northern Irish history has, however, come from post-Althusserian scholars like Paul Bew, Peter Gibbon and Henry Patterson,* and their work on the class dynamics of Unionism, as well as the nature of Southern nationalism, leads to very different conclusions: Struggles over the status of the North are no more automatically anti-imperialist than crimes ...”

“... back tae snowk at his bockin ... Grumphie douks i the burn, an syne rows again i the glaur. (II Peter 2.22: ‘The dog is turned to his own vomit again; and the sow that was washed to her wallowing in the mire’). Except perhaps for a few scholars, no one, however Scots, is going to know all the words in this translation; most Scots will not know a great ...”

“... compatriots. In Rome, Catholic priests formed part of the British colony, the genial Scot Peter Grant being ‘an agreeable companion to everybody’ and the Jesuit John Thorpe acting as an agent for the purchase of works of art. Father Thorpe commissioned paintings and furnishings for the chapel of Wardour Castle in Wiltshire, a unique surviving ...”

“... into bringing in the naughty gear, which nowadays would barely draw a glance at Sydney’s annual Gay and Lesbian Ball. Goossens was fined £100; he resigned his conductorship of the new Sydney Symphony Orchestra and died broken-hearted and forgotten back in England. The Opera House had already lost its first, most eloquent and influential champion. The ...”

“... leaving her in imminent danger of being convicted of poisoning her worthless ex-lover. Lord Peter Wimsey, whimsically love-struck and coming to the rescue, confronts the real villain: Yes, well, about this arsenic. As you know, it’s not good for people in a general way, but there are some people – those tiresome peasants in Styria one hears so much ...”

“... of consciousness, planetary extinction – have become urgent global concerns, a critic like Peter Schjeldahl in the New Yorker, presumably speaking for a politburo, can still assure his readers that Burroughs ‘wages literary war not on perceptible real-world targets but against suggestions that anyone is responsible for anything’ and that a writer ...”

“... Fund to a range of Hungarian NGOs, including the Roma Press Agency, the Rainbow Association (for gay rights), the Foundation for Democratic Youth and the Hungarian branch of Transparency International, on the grounds that these are all ‘anti-government organisations’. When an independent online paper interviewed experts on matters of public ...”

“... has less to say. It is well illustrated by Three Hours after Marriage, a farce written by John Gay, with the assistance of John Arbuthnot and the young Alexander Pope, which was performed at Drury Lane in 1717. The leading character, Dr Fossile, has just married a much younger woman (‘the best of my curiosities’) and is unaware that two would-be ...”