“... DVD). No, they didn’t use melons for the knife-slashing sounds, but beef, which the sound man took home and roasted after the shoot. There was, Skerry insists several times, a hazy shot of Leigh’s or a body double’s nipple behind the shower curtain, and of the knife tip entering flesh, which both Leigh and Hitchcock denied. And Saul Bass merely ...”

“... support for the divorce. But Pole delayed showing his hand in any public way, and early in 1532 took himself out of the national debate and returned to Italy. This was the beginning of 23 years of exile, during which time a high-powered ecclesiastical career almost propelled him to the papacy. But in the mid-1530s his situation was delicately poised. Henry ...”

“... be said to have exceeded its ends: first in the rhetorical and stylistic games of patterning that took over the writing of the time, and second in the fact that many graduates could find no employment. The 1590s, plague-struck and famine-ridden, saw university-trained men moving faute de mieux into the new London theatres, underpaid but not (most of ...”

“... like Thomas More, it was Luther who was Muhammad, in his iconoclasm and his lust, a priest who took a wife and bid Protestant clergymen to do the same. Or it was Calvin: a Catholic almanac depicted Satan with one claw on the turbaned prophet’s shoulder, the other sunk into the pastor’s. The Christians’ version of Muhammad was violent and ...”

“... maintaining that it’s all in good fun and shouldn’t be taken (too) seriously’. According to John Lindow’s ‘unnatural history’ of trolls, the original trolls of Scandinavian folklore punished improper behaviour and upheld social norms. If you take the behavioural code of lulz seriously and erase any commitment to social norms, what you are left ...”

“... and how, may be difficult to determine. The Hetling trial made great play with this ambiguity. John Mortimer, for the defence, asked a collector who appeared as a prosecution witness, having bought several ‘Hetlings’, why he had bought them. Was it for investment and financial gain or simply because he thought they were beautiful? The collector replied ...”

“... that put the issue back on the agenda in Wales. During his brief time as Labour leader, John Smith tasked Davies with drawing up plans for devolution in Wales. Smith was a true believer, unlike Tony Blair. But Blair inherited fully formed plans for devolution in Scotland and Wales when he became leader in 1994, and Smith’s commitment to hold ...”

“... In 1978 Terry Eagleton wrote an essay on John Bayley in the New Left Review. It is a ritual excoriation of that most tactful of ‘liberal humanist’ critics, punctuated with predictable sneers about ‘a view of life from the Oxford senior common room window’ and how Bayley’s criticism prizes a liberal disorder that depends on a conservative order ‘within which the gentleman may wear his art and opinions lightly ...”

“... sa vie et ses ouvrages’, is plagiarised from two articles in the Southern Literary Messenger by John R. Thompson and John M. Daniel. Daniel’s article is plagiarised in its turn from Griswold’s obituary of Poe – a fraud within a fraud within a fraud. Traduttore: tradittore. If, as the Italians say, to translate is to ...”

“... a model for Hugh Moreland in A Dance to the Music of Time), William Walton, Dylan Thomas, Augustus John, Elisabeth Lutyens, John Lehmann, Louis Macneice, Alan Rawsthorne, Michael Ayrton. In the dark background are the diabolic Bernard Van Dieren and Philip Heseltine (‘Peter Warlock’), two men, composer-writers like ...”

“... that the link was as clear to Malthus as it is to Macfarlane, for the early political economists took for granted the workings of private enterprise, and saw the desire to obtain the necessities and comforts of life as an essential part of human nature. Macfarlane’s anthropological experience of other cultures, and his knowledge of the different ...”

“... far from being aligned, these men were at loggerheads. Here interlopers like Matthew Cradock and John Fowke were joined with Lord Saye and Sale, Lord Brooke and the Earl of Warwick. Their policies entailed curtailing the power of the Directors and Governor by making them financially accountable, by increasing the control of the generality, by switching to ...”

“... about their visions of the role of government. Both the Democratic and Republican platforms took pains to point out how starkly each differed from the other in its view of the state. The columnist Richard Reeves predicted in February that the contest for the Presidency would be decided by a single issue: what Americans think of the President’s ...”

“... the seedlings. Delivery was complicated owing to ‘the bulk [that] arises from the bellows’, as John Tyndall, the Institution’s professor of natural philosophy, explained.In such peaceful pursuits, surrounded by his family and struggling, though less than in some years, with the mysterious illnesses that had dogged him for decades, Darwin conformed to the ...”

“... the new US ambassador to the Vatican had been ratified by the Senate. He could easily, if the mood took him, find a willing camera somewhere in front of St Peter’s and call on the Church to keep its nose out of American politics, to concentrate instead on cleaning up its own doctrinal house. It wasn’t hard to imagine Vance, in that week, as Trump’s ...”