“... Sherfield case under Charles I, says that ‘ultimately the Elizabethan compromise did as much to foster as to camouflage conflict.’ The study of images leads her, as the study of theology led Dr Tyacke, to reject the old Anglican-Puritan antithesis: she concludes that ‘iconomachy may not have been the chosen path of the Supreme Governor, but it ...”

“... enough, it also raises a question about the role of this kind of journalism: namely, does it not foster what it most purports to scorn? In particular, isn’t such journalism precisely what celebrity feeds upon? Take the piece on Hugh Hefner. It invites us, willy-nilly, to find his cupidity, mendacity and baseness somehow interesting, a fit object of ...”

“... took a while for everyone to notice. In U&I (1991), his witty exploration of his feelings towards John Updike (‘this imaginary friend I have constructed out of sodden crisscrossing strips of rivalry and gratefulness over an armature of remembered misquotation’), he mentions his surprise at being compared to Alain Robbe-Grillet and Francis Ponge by ...”

“... to The God That Failed, a 1949 book edited by the Labour MP Richard Crossman. He went on to foster a series of CIA-funded seminars, populated by Encounter contributors, in the Austrian ski resort of Alpbach.Koestler’s adventurous past in the Spanish Civil War, along with his explorations of cosmology (The Sleepwalkers) and of the Stalin purges ...”

“... of Wagner’s racism can hardly be avoided. The Wagner circle and the intimates of Winifred’s foster-parents were among Hitler’s earliest supporters. Hitler himself acknowledged the role of Klindworth’s friend Heinrich Class, writing: ‘Politically, we stand on the shoulders of the Pan-German League.’ Another friend, Helene Bechstein, whose salon ...”

“... during the 1970s, when holidays brought together the Heaneys, the Hammonds, Deane, Brian Friel and John Hume; there is a book to be written about those summers and their consequences, in politics and in the arts.But Heaney’s debts to music pre-date Hammond, and extend far beyond his example. A blind musician, Rosie Keenan (remembered in the poem ‘At the ...”

“... Leone’s long, long close-up of Eastwood’s or Fonda’s impassive face; the Warhol movie of John Giorno sleeping for five hours and 20 minutes; Jarman’s 79-minute single shot of saturated blue.Or I could do nothing. I could sit in sadistic silence waiting for whatever is next on his list of diagnostic appointment moves for all ...”

“... the old order, they were in general expected to give support. They had a duty to honour Kultur and foster Bildung. In the new, they were expected to criticise, and to do so with the freedom the bourgeoisie purported to respect. But in so doing, they lost respect. As a result, the intellectual, ‘having no genuine authority and feeling always in danger of ...”

“... to cash in on the popularity of Charlie Chan. Based on third-rate mystery novels churned out by John P. Marquand, the films feature an inscrutable and delicate Japanese detective/ spy called Mr Moto, a master of jujitsu. Who better to play Moto than a dumpy, tragicomic Hungarian? The director of the first film, Norman ...”

“... Life, invented by Milton Bradley in 1860, which was itself a reinvention of Elizabeth Newbery and John Wallis’s moralising New Game of Human Life from 1790. The 18th-century version had a snakes-and-ladders set-up: players were sent forward to maturity when they landed on virtues and back to childhood when they landed on vices. It was unplayably boring; the ...”

“... the wishes of the Northern majority. Haughey never had scruples about endorsing this harsh claim. John Hume maintained that these articles only expressed a harmless aspiration, of which no one took much notice, but would not concede that the Council of Ireland would bring these clauses to the forefront of attention. FitzGerald was sufficiently sensitive to ...”

“... that his near invisibility sustained his authority and he never sought the limelight, but as John Macnicol points out in a brief but sharp entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, for two decades his word was, almost literally, law: ‘In the interwar years no policy proposal could proceed to legislation without the actuary’s ...”

“... offer an opinion, but in The Warrior he quotes a former Wimbledon semi-finalist, the US player John Isner, who says that Nadal is ‘the greatest competitor in any sport in the history of the world’. In a field stratified by the hard evidence of rankings and results, how can value judgments be so hard to prove? There’s broad consensus about the ...”

“... officials were Masons and Bongo was encouraged to establish his own lodges in Gabon in order to foster solidarity with Elf. Bongo’s loyalty to the Gaullist party and Elf was so strong that when Mitterrand came to power in 1981, the Gabonese leader threatened to switch to US oil partners. In the end a compromise was reached – Mitterrand agreed not to ...”

“... in Oberkampf in the 1990s, and in his photography book and in his jazz book, and in the one about John Berger he did in 1986, as he was starting out. He writes, often, about romance and glamour and pleasure and excitement. Even more, he writes about listlessness and ambivalence and prevarication, the digressions and distractions that seem to stop him getting ...”