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“... like the dreadful Vodi, despoilers of life, who work for Nelly, the witch with pointed teeth, in John Braine’s best novel, The Vodi, which appeared in 1959. Such demonic fantasies are quite common, I think, when young men are locked in a long-running conversation in, say, barrack-rooms or hospital wards. In Pinter’s case, the fantasy of ‘the ...”

“... Designed to keep the hair from obscuring the vision, it was pulled so tight that, as the veteran John Shipp testified, a soldier could scarcely open his eyes. The Tsar’s soldiers had their queues stiffened by iron bars. But the most hated item of equipment was the neckstock, a kind of heavy leather cravat intended to force the soldier’s head erect ...”

“... paid for this is solider reading (not helped by some eccentric paragraphing). The rise and rise of Joseph Paxton should have accustomed us by now to the fact that the head gardeners to the great estates of yesteryear were not necessarily the counterpart of today’s municipal park keepers. The grand scale on which they were required to operate, ordering about ...”

“... Sir Keith Joseph has chosen a good moment to kill off the Schools Council. It seems that it is a good moment to kill off all sorts of things. While thousands of young men are exposed unnecessarily to violence, and to its infliction – supposedly on our behalf, more probably to satisfy the vanity of a few unjust men and women, who want to go on running this country for a bit – a whole generation of young people faces a future of unemployment ...”

“... a real public is impressed, but a ‘new Jackson Pollock’ can be manufactured very easily. Joseph Alsop in The Rare Art Traditions reports a conversation with a modern plutocrat who had just paid a ‘huge sum for an alleged Rembrandt’. Asked why he paid so much, he reeled off figures: the high number of Rembrandts in public collections, and the very ...”

“... whose gatherings at the Turk’s Head in Gerrard Street included Burke, Reynolds, Goldsmith, Sir Joseph Banks, Burney, Garrick, Sheridan, Gibbon and Adam Smith. In their role as self-appointed custodians of culture, literary clubs combined some of the functions of the Paris salon and the university the capital lacked. There was no true continental equivalent ...”

“... and which prefigures the cross, the Last Supper, the lamb of God, the pointing finger of John the Baptist, the resurrected Christ trampling the dragon or skeleton of sin and death. Many of them also depict the new church, in representations of Protestant celebration of the gospel sacraments of baptism and communion, and in portraits of its leaders or ...”

“... name of a fictional spy? Why couldn’t Fleming have used another pair of common monosyllables – John Clark, say? Bond is a solid, blue-chip, faith-giving kind of a name. Who wouldn’t prefer a government Bond under their mattress (we’re talking AAA British) to a petty clerk? Is your word your clerk? I don’t think so. Bond. It’s in the name. More than ...”

“... of these critics, but the realisation that writers like Conrad and Kipling, or Jane Austen and John Stuart Mill, thought and wrote without the natives in mind as an audience. An Indian or Jamaican woman reading Kim or Jane Eyre was able to bring to light the usually unstated colonial and male-dominated ideological assumptions behind the form of the novel ...”

“... wilderness renamed is still a wilderness,’ writes Lawson-Peebles in apparent agreement with John Quincy Adams and Joseph Hall, both of whom had scorned the ‘edenic’ fables told about the West. But is it? Yes, in the sense that you can still starve or freeze or get eaten in it. But we’re talking about writing and ...”

“... Joseph Mitchell​ of Fairmont, North Carolina lived one of the classic American lives: dreamy boy in a Southern town with a mother interested in the finer things, read a zillion books in college following no particular plan, decided he was going to get a newspaper job in New York City and become a writer, and by God did ...”

“... reposed in Jesus-Colledge’ – but left the publishers alone. In the mid and late 17th century, John Hayes and the entrepreneur John Field, whose Bibles were so inaccurate that he was later suspected of taking bribes to alter the text in Acts, worked in relative harmony with the Stationers, collaborating with London ...”

“... and sculpture undermined art’s humanity. ‘Painting is made out of a love for the subject,’ John Minton repeatedly told his students at the Royal College of Art, in defiance of an abstract tradition that had resurfaced with Victor Pasmore’s 1948 abstracts. Pasmore became a leading member of the Constructionists: abstract artists who abandoned nature ...”

“... laid out in the discourses he delivered as President of the Royal Academy. It was re-created by John Barrell in his influential Political Theory of Painting (1986). Drawing on J.G.A. Pocock’s politics of civic humanism, Barrell replaced the two traditions of painting with a tradition of academic theory – from Shaftesbury to Reynolds and so on – which ...”

“... the Government wavering, the Tyneham campaigners played their last card. Lord Fenner Brockway took John Gould, a road-sweeper who was already among Tyneham’s most symbolised villagers, to 10 Downing Street. A life-long member of the Labour Party, Gould presented Harold Wilson with a wreath made of ivy picked from the ruins of the cottage in which he had been ...”