“... One or two suggest I prostrate myself (an inevitable image here of Audrey Hepburn face down in the stone-paved aisle) and pray to the Holy Mother of Jesus, who will cure anyone who asks and believes in her. Even a Jew? Why? A gratuity. A gift given freely, regardless. And yet Mary Mother of Christ doesn’t really give freely – she wants you to ask and for ...”

“... as a surprise when I turned a corner and found myself at the entrance to the graveyard. A decrepit stone arch, the equivalent of an English church’s lychgate but taller and more forbidding, opened onto an oblong patch of crammed, stacked graves. They were so densely pressed together that they seemed to be squeezing against one another, as only living things ...”

“... but the British seized a collection of antiquities destined for the Louvre – including a stone slab found at Rashid (or Rosetta) in the Delta, whose three inscriptions were already seen as a potential key to reading hieroglyphs. Words were added to the sides of the slab when it reached London: ‘Captured in Egypt by the British Army in 1801’ and ...”

“... nor the darkness of sexual desire has changed so very much.’ He also writes that the allusion in Richard II to Phaethon universalises the King’s situation and that this in its turn contributes to ‘the enduring power’ of Shakespearean tragedy. I would guess that such sentences will attract a now almost automatic hostility. Lewis himself allowed that ...”

“... square. One scene must stand as an example. Carpets are unrolled and cushions piled high on the stone and sand of the quarry to create a luxurious court. A king and his entourage loll back, enjoying a witty puppet-show produced from behind a multi-coloured cloth. The puppet seems to run amok, stealing kisses from the ladies. It’s all very ...”

“... incompatible mixture of opposites. But Plato would have been surprised by what happened next: a stone smashes the image in pieces and then enlarges to fill the whole earth. This event, which Daniel interprets as the establishment of God’s kingdom on earth at the end of the process of degeneration, has no parallel in Plato, or in later classical visions of ...”

“... built in the mid-16th century, as the ne plus ultra of aspirational timber framing. The carpenter, Richard Dale, whose name appears with that of the owner, William Moreton, on one of the windows, gave the framing a raking design which creates on the exterior an elaborate dazzle effect. Starting out with an H-plan house, Dale and Moreton added every latest ...”

“... sweeping along any number of clichés, truisms and allusions in its wake, as when describing Richard Burton in Rich (1988): ‘He was driven by a devil that he never knew but he never stopped fighting, a maker of his own myths, Celtic, Faustian, an Icarus and a Don Juan, coming out from his beloved Wales like a mystical warrior to rove the world for ...”

“... specification of the relationship between public expenditure and unemployment became the corner-stone of the Treasury’s argument that public works meant inflation.’ It might be true that Hawtry was wheeled in to give a plausible economic rationale for this view, but this surely is to overrate its significance. The notion that the state might ameliorate ...”

“... her grave in the Jewish cemetery at Père Lachaise thirty years after her death, not only was the stone covered with scribbled names but fans were still dropping their visiting cards through the grating. Another literary admirer, Matthew Arnold, mourned her as a symbol of the conflicting forces of Hebraism and Hellenism. ‘Greek-soul’d’ and ‘Trick’d ...”

“... the work. And she explores this with as much questing and well-furnished unobtrusive cleverness as Richard Sewall brought to his two-volume life of Emily Dickinson – another ‘dotty spinster’, who wrote of her own life: ‘Nothing has happened but loneliness.’ Stevie Smith would not, I think, have said that, though she was much aware of loneliness. Her ...”

“... captive audience to give her views on ‘Zionist thugs’.) In recent years, Richard Gere’s moist tribute to the Dalai Lama has been more the sort of thing. That, plus a lot of red ribbons in solidarity with Aids victims. This year, the red ribbons were down a bit and the preferred cause was Public Broadcasting, which the Gingrich ...”

“... The description of what we might call Pan prior, ‘the first chimpanzee’, is from an essay by Richard Wrangham in Tree of Origin. Like The Ape and the Sushi Master, Tree of Origin proposes that we (human beings) share with our near primate cousins some of the behaviour we like best in ourselves. Professional primate-watchers are usually wary of venturing ...”

“... between the experience of seeing something and earlier English poetry. It has a tincture of Richard Crashaw’s Counter-Reformation gory godliness; a flavour of Gerard Manley Hopkins in the way it risks going too far with the alliterating ‘bleb’ and ‘blood’; and the echt Hill quality of making it appear that just seeing something can hurt. The ...”

“... ballad-mongers and historians combined to give him his unsupported date in the time of King Richard’s exile, his wholly bogus aristocratic status as a dispossessed heir to the earldom of Huntingdon, and, somewhat incongruously, a greatly enlarged corpus of unashamedly plebeian opponents with an ever-increasing tendency to improve on the potter’s ...”