“... where it came from and why it is worth stealing. And if you quote from memory, get it right. When Andrew Motion, no hero to Amis, says that Larkin’s anthology was meant to promote ‘the taste by which he wished to be relished’ he is adapting a remark of Wordsworth’s – ‘every author, as far as he is great and at the same time original, has had the ...”

“... this took a menacing turn. On the morning of 14 August 1765, Bostonians discovered an effigy of Andrew Oliver, a local worthy who had applied for the post of stamp collector, hanging on a venerable elm at the corner of Essex and Orange Streets. In case anybody failed to get the message, the effigy had on its right sleeve the initials AO, and on its left a ...”

“... He argued for armed struggle against those who would later become more radical than him, notably George Habash of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. For a time, it worked. The Palestinians took pride in the achievements, however modest, of their young men against a vastly superior Israeli army with superpower weapons. Arafat had received ...”

“... stable and suitable for life.As an illustration, in 1983 Lovelock and the atmospheric scientist Andrew Watson devised Daisyworld, a computer simulation of a hypothetical world in which ecological competition between daisies of different colours affects planetary albedo, or the amount of solar radiation that is reflected back out into space – one of the ...”

“... convicted paedophile.’ So much for Hill the inspiring teacher and widely admired college head. Andrew Roberts in the Daily Mail went so far as to assert, as though it were an established fact rather than wild fiction, that Hill had been unmasked as a ‘spy’ and had been ‘revealed as an “agent of influence” for Stalin’s USSR at the very time he ...”

“... in before that Charlie Richardson, leader of the Richardson Gang, was buried here, as well as George Cornell, the gangster shot by the Kray Twins in The Blind Beggar pub. But it was the graves and sentry toys of the unknown children that had lodged in my mind. The trees were bare, filtering light on the tombstones and pointing down at the stories gathered ...”

“... to define and interpret doctrine. If the Crown threatened that power, implied the future bishop George Carleton in 1610, then bishops ‘have warrant not to obey princes, because with these things Christ hath put them in trust’. By now the divine right of bishops was becoming a familiar doctrine. It may have owed its origin to the nervousness with which ...”

“... principle, but some are more questionable than others. One of the more surprising inclusions is Andrew Marvell. To classify him as one who suffered ‘the experience of defeat’, we would need more certainty about his convictions than is easy to come by: the author of ‘Last Instructions to a Painter’ is also the author of ‘To Richard Lovelace’, and ...”

“... he wrote (again, though, not to Amis), novels that would be ‘a mix of Lawrence, Thomas Hardy and George Eliot’. In order to achieve this aim, he is already shaping up to distance himself from enfeebling human attachments: ‘I find that once I “give in” to another person ... there is a slackening and dulling of the peculiar artistic fibres.’ As early ...”

“... thin on the ground. It generously acknowledges the Bodleian Library, along with Jim and Pat, George and Gaye, Cheri and Jamie, Nick, Norman and Jane and a horde of fellow boozers at the author’s local pub, not to mention Andrew, Mandana, Bill, Dorcas, Jo, Laura and a host of others at his London club. Some of these ...”

“... the most future-orientated moment in Bleak House is not the trial’s conclusion, but trooper George Rouncewell’s journey north to Sheffield, in Chapter 63, to seek out his brother, a self-made man and owner of a vast iron foundry. George’s first look at the foundry is a look straight through the solid ontology of ...”

“... Welles anticipated Andy Warhol, who also enjoys a posthumous existence as a movie character.) George Orson Welles was born in 1915 and appeared first as the wunderkind whose Shakespeare productions – the ‘Fascist’ Julius Caesar, the ‘voodoo’ Macbeth – dazzled New York theatregoers in the 1930s and who, when not spooking radio listeners as the ...”

“... desire for direct contact with the public, and the same is true of the novels, in which, as George Eliot put it, ‘he seems to bring his arm-chair to the proscenium.’ Powerful theatre managers had to be dealt with, like Marplay in The Author’s Farce, but according to the theatre historian Robert Hume, ‘Fielding quickly made himself the most ...”

“... the water of the Severne, Trent or Thames cannot wash away.‘What are private losses,’ Major George Wither asked, ‘while we view/Three famous Kingdoms, woefully expos’d.’ Historians of the period know the frustration of encountering narratives that edge towards, but ultimately recoil from, personal experience. Evidential shortcomings are ...”

“... presumably real events as a press reception for the English Country Cheese Council. Learning that George Best is for sale for £200,000, he toys with the idea of using a recent legacy to buy him as ‘a companion on my occasional visits to the night club scene of our metropolis’, but reflecting that Best has a reputation for being ‘rather off-hand’ with ...”