“... In a recent Times article, Philip Howard pounced on the deplorable word ‘Valorisation’ which seems to be trying to edge its way into the English language. ‘To enhance the price, value or status of by organised ... action’ is one of the meanings he quotes for it. Here is an example of one such usage: ‘the literary critics’ valorisation of tradition ...”

“... details, while he took no account whatsoever of the other more important aspects … And in short, whereas he had thought to surpass in this work all the paintings in this craft, he scarcely reached the level of his own works executed in times past. Binet reproduces this passage, imagining it appearing in a letter Vasari sent to Michelangelo on 7 ...”

“... an extract from Wesker’s The Kitchen. Less emblematic but equally germane is the story, told in Philip Hoare’s 1995 biography, of Coward’s visit to the Court to see David Storey’s grittily realistic Rugby League play The Changing Room. His attention having been drawn to the male genitalia on display in the bath scene, Coward remarked: ‘13 acorns are ...”

“... but without a capital ‘h’, and without the stronger proprietorial claims now well-established. Philip Friedman, pioneer of Jewish history under the Nazis, used it: but only as a descriptive equivalent with several others, and he seems to have preferred the expression ‘the Jewish Catastrophe’. At this stage ‘holocaust’ may have been more commonly ...”

“... its pioneers to the margins. Wrack’s book is an attempt at restoration. It’s a long history. Philip Sidney’s ‘A Dialogue between Two Shepherds’ (c.1580) contains one of the earliest recorded references to football: ‘A tyme there is for all, my mother often sayes,/When she, with skirts tuckt very hy, with girles at football playes.’ There are ...”

“... up alongside bank robbery and murder. His books do not offer hope. Right can only win in the short term. We are all guilty of existence and our sheer numbers make us enemies of the good green earth. Ben Elton dabbled in these waters in Stark, and, despite the jokes, there is no reason to believe that he or Hiaasen think humans are capable of much ...”

“... and her combination of the staged and the documentary puts her in company with Bill Brandt, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Gregory Crewdson, Wall and others. It’s more interesting, however, to consider her work alongside that of contemporary female practitioners: the psychoanalytically inflected images of young girls by Sarah Jones; Justine Kurland’s ...”

“... Miss Lucy and drunken Miss Amy. When she comes home on an awkward visit from England with her short-tempered husband, he makes their little boy return Miss Amy’s gift of sweeties from her coat-pocket. He has no way of knowing how much has been rejected. ‘By such choices we gradually become exiles until at last we are quite alone.’ In ‘My Sister ...”

“... Revisions’ (Elizabeth Cary, Aemilia Lanyer and Mary Wroth). Each chapter contains a short biography and textual explications that analyse ‘the conflicts among the various authorities that claimed a woman’s duty – her own family, her husband, her King, her religion’. Lewalski is most successful when tracing the paradoxical effects of such ...”

“... movies and television, and one of them is that TV thrives on situations, faces, interruptions and short-term drama, which is why games, soap operas and interviews make such ideal material for it. What TV doesn’t seem to need is a world, a created visual space with its own aura and co-ordinates. The world it has is enough, our world caught on a camera; or no ...”

“... historian and writer for children, has been singled out for praise by critics as diverse as Philip Toynbee, Francis King, Angus Wilson and Andrew Sinclair. All feel that he lacks the large audience he deserves. Yet the curious reader, anxious to gain more information about this somewhat enigmatic writer, of undoubted power (and above all vision), may ...”

“... by our intelligence come out to play. We meet ancestral selves, neither gods nor demons but short semi-humans with hairy ears and senses differently attuned – the eyesight of an eagle, the nose of a hound. The phenomena are internal, generated by the psychological mechanisms that connect us to each other and to our evolutionary past. Aware of ...”

“... Mary, with the husband who by the 1570s was something of an embarrassing national memory, Philip II of Spain. While Philip and Mary are depicted with perfect fairness, and in what might be considered the position of honour, they yield in size and body language to the star of the picture, Queen Elizabeth. The only ...”

“... with a brief article in Nature in 1959, when two astrophysicists at Cornell, Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison, postulated that there existed a uniquely well-suited frequency, nestled in the microwave portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, at which intelligent civilisations might seek to communicate with us. Frank Drake, an astronomer at a newly ...”

“... the time. Not only that, but afterwards she was under strong pressure from the film’s director, Philip Blenheim, not to reveal that she was anything more than an operator of special effects. Publicising her human contribution would spoil the magic of the film, you see, and he was bound to be against that. The echoes of ET are pretty deafening here, though ...”