“... open over a secret courtyard, and I could hear what sounded like an old TV broadcast, the voice of Peter Jennings saying it was a historic moment. I wasn’t imagining it: the sound was coming from the Brandenburg Gate, where images from the fall of the Wall were being projected onto the façade to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of reunification.Fresh ...”

“... appalled by the touch of a female. After a brisk march through the history of sainthood – from Peter and Paul to the Reformation in just ninety pages – Bartlett turns to a leisured exploration of liturgical commemoration, relics and shrines, pilgrimage, church dedications, personal and place names, images of the saints and literary genres, including ...”

“... dynasties on the island should intermarry to unite ‘Greater Britain’. Not until 1603, when James VI succeeded to the English throne, would talk of union become orthodox. More than an accident of naming links the scholastic philosopher John Major with John Major of Brixton: they stand at either end of a long phase of political development. The Early ...”

“... and democratic vulgarity. J.R. Ackerley’s world was in its own way not so different. Peter Parker has already written a searching book, The Old Lie: The Great War and the Public School Ethos, and his long and thorough account of Ackerley’s career is even better, still more revealing. Ackerley’s odd provenance, well-known from his own book, My ...”

“... smallest police station (a plinth in Trafalgar Square), its first Greek Revival building (James Stuart’s Doric temple of 1758 at Hagley Park) and Temple Bar (in its present situation in a Hertfordshire wood) are all follies by Headley’s and Meulencamp’s definition. The first, like many of their eye-catchers and shams, is not quite what it ...”

“... Labour. But by that autumn the IMF had caught up with the Wilson Government, now presided over by James Callaghan. The next year, the unions declared once more for free collective bargaining and last year the pay policy was repudiated. The Government tried once more to govern without the consent of the trade unions. Once more it failed. It was the Scots who ...”

“... Van Dyck did not settle in England in 1621. Blake’s picture of the sleazy English court during James I’s last years (did the King make a pass at Van Dyck? he wonders) and the suggestion that the Vangoose mocked by Jonson in his Masque of Augurs was a jibe at Van Dyck, makes plausible his suggestion that Van Dyck went back to Antwerp because he found ...”

“... After that new organists often got one immediately. The pattern at the abbey was very similar: James Turle was the last of the old type, having been organist there for 51 years, starting in 1831, without official acknowledgment. His successor, Frederick Bridge, was knighted in 1897. Again, every subsequent organist was so recognised until the run ended ...”

“... images and exhausted subjects; from Glen Ligon’s black on black painting of a paragraph from a James Baldwin essay to Chohreh Feyzdjou’s smearing of black pigment on jars and boxes that contain the scrolled text of her autobiography. As Enwezor envisaged, many ‘new relations of spectatorship’ were introduced, relations which drew on the tragic and ...”

“... of pleasure, not least in its Parisian variants, is a very solemn, high-toned affair. Either, like Peter Brooks in Body Work, you write about this bizarre stuff in an impeccably academic idiom, thus risking an incongruous clash of form and content; or, like some of his American colleagues, you let the body take over your script and risk disappearing up your ...”

“... possessive father Gerald – who played Captain Hook/Mr Darling on the stage and passed on a dire Peter-Panishness to her – were the now forgotten bestsellers of a man who spoke to the anxieties of the 1890s. Peter Ibbetson (1891) was an earlier Peter Pan, the fantasy of a cloudless ...”

“... to mid-century American pulp fiction. In his introduction to Manchette’s The Mad and the Bad, James Sallis quotes Chandler on the ‘realist in murder’, whowrites of a world in which gangsters can rule nations and almost rule cities, in which hotels and apartment houses and celebrated restaurants are owned by men who made their money out of brothels, in ...”

“... he is all of the showbusiness spectacles we have ever known rolled into one: Barnum & Bailey to James Brown, Edgar Allan Poe to Shirley Temple, and David Blaine, and Peter Pan, all the way back to Neverland. We want to see him as pop’s greatest distortion of human nature, which he may be, but isn’t he also the most ...”

“... interpretations of the period by Stephen Greenblatt, Louis Montrose, Steven Mullancy and Peter Stallybrass (among others) and a chapter on Othello. This is less a translation than a new study in its own right. One of the great virtues of Shakespeare’s Festive World is the scrupulous care with which its investigations are conducted. Arming himself ...”

“... aficionados started touring the country in search of old records that a handful of them – Skip James, Son House, Mississippi John Hurt – were ‘rediscovered’. They became draws on the coffee-house and festival circuit, while recordings by John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, who had made their names playing house-rocking, amplified blues ...”