“... broad canvas, populated by a fascinating array of characters. Mythic figures (Lincoln, Grant, Lee, Jackson), seen afresh, acquire sharper outlines. Second-tier players have their moment in the limelight: the secretary of state William Seward drinks too much and blusters about invading Canada; the US ambassador Charles Francis Adams keeps a stiff and ...”

“... I’d learned about growing up. And there was Kim Gordon, lined up between Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo, in the middle of the huge stage, not a token girl bass player, not a riot grrrl in an angry all-girl band, but a musician among musicians, standing next to her husband, to all appearances equal, taking turns. It meant something, the way she was, and ...”

“... Tahitian islands – which stretched from several hundred to two thousand miles away under their lee and would have made for easy downwind sailing. Afraid of encountering cannibals on these islands, they decided instead to beat to windward against strong trade winds in an attempt to reach the South American coast, a far tougher, longer, more dangerous ...”

“... A 12-year-old girl with a wounded foot and an ulcerated mouth guards Mallory, armed with a rusty Lee Enfield that is to figure talismanically throughout the subsequent story. Mallory tries to escape, and the girl pulls the trigger. At this point it is plausible to assume an Incident-at-Owl-Creek twist. But as the written story tells us, the firing pin or ...”

“... with that world of financial services and consultancies which floated on the oil. At best we were Matthew Arnolds’s ‘remnant’. Class counted. In retrospect, this episode recalled the subterranean Institute in Alasdair Gray’s Lanark, where the delegates to an interminable conference spectate on the external world via an immense camera obscura. Gray ...”

“... Its payroll features several Tory MPs on decent salaries, including the party’s deputy chairman, Lee Anderson, who pockets £100,000 a year to host a Friday night show. Anderson also spoke at NatCon. At the ‘gala dinner’, Douglas Murray (whose latest book is The War on the West) insisted that Britons should not be prevented from loving their nation just ...”

“... when I haven’t heard a word, I sit halfway down the south aisle festooned in hearing aids in the lee of a plaque to Flora Robson. But someone must have taken the acoustics in hand because if anything it’s too noisy and I turn one of them off. It’s a good service, a model, with none of the speakers – his two sons, Richard Eyre and Robert Bathurst ...”

“... Carter’s ‘private opera house of the individual sensibility’. In an essay from 1911, Vernon Lee described the knack of seeing past the individual production: imprisoned in her seat, the spectator could allow her mind to ‘divagate from the music only to the stage; not the literal stage of indifferently painted lath and pasteboard, with its ...”

“... of real actors are used it wouldn’t work.24 January. Watch a DVD of Pride, the film, directed by Matthew Warchus, based on the support offered by lesbian and gay groups to the miners during the strike in the 1980s. It’s one of a trio of British films (the others The Full Monty and Brassed Off) spawned by the Thatcher era which benefit from having such a ...”

“... eye of God the Father. Christ is emptying St John’s eagle out of a sack into a hopper to join St Matthew’s angel, St Mark’s lion, St Luke’s ox and St Paul with his sword. They are ground into the pure flour of hope, faith and love, scooped up and bagged by Erasmus the miller under the supervision of the dove of the Holy Ghost and handed on to Luther ...”

“... to explaining their nature and their provenance. In the tradition of Edmond Malone and Sir Sidney Lee, Schoenbaum was minutely conversant with the written records of Shakespeare’s life and career, but this antiquarian proficiency was complicated by his equally formidable knowledge of the radically changing desires and assumptions which have conditioned ...”

“... by setting up a general store in Boars Hill outside Oxford, the landscape across which Matthew Arnold’s Scholar Gypsy had wandered the previous century, and where by the early 1920s both the poet laureate Robert Bridges and the future poet laureate John Masefield had established themselves in suburban comfort. Graves lived from 1919 to 1921 in ...”

“... the end of Stevenson’s Bitter Fame, is a vituperative, fey document, with odd dashes of Lorelei Lee. Merwin does indeed depict Plath ‘grimly downing the Fons foie gras for all the world as though it were “Aunt Dot’s meat loaf”’. I began with a sickened feeling but ended up genuinely entertained. ‘Sylvia’s baleful silence was eventually broken ...”

“... were disastrous, and although her colleague, Rob Hale, freely admits to being a descendant of Sir Matthew Hale, the last Chief Justice to hang a witch in England, she has the intensity of the embattled campaigner rather than the obsessional quality of the zealot. In 1990, Sinason was contacted by a Swedish psychologist, Anders Svensson, who was working with a ...”

“... as brutal as the war the men will eventually fight. Kubrick hired a real marine drill sergeant, Lee Ermey, to play the part, and was rewarded by the best performance in the movie. The choice confirmed his old insistence on fidelity to nature. ‘No one can “make up” a tree,’ he said, ‘because every tree has an inherent logic in the way it ...”