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“... a few featureless stumps and badly weathered monsters lying about the garden behind the apse. As Michael Camille points out, gargoyles bear the brunt of the weather: they are part of ‘the exoderm of the edifice’, eroded by the water they channel away from the building. They were never intended to last, which might account for their flippancy or ...”

“... other writers.’ As Gelpi rightly points out, Day Lewis did always have his defenders. Early on, Michael Roberts claimed that From Feathers to Iron (1931) was ‘a landmark, in the sense in which Leaves of Grass, A Shropshire Lad, Des Imagistes and The Waste Land were landmarks’. And on the occasion of his death, Kingsley Amis declared that Day ...”

“... even a dead Enemy might bite back.) Still more complex was his relationship with Eliot. Professor King suggests that Eliot was for Read a father figure ‘whom he could emulate, rebel against and, at times, loathe’, and that seems about right. Eliot published Read’s poems, his essays, and some of his books about art, but at times was sharply critical of ...”

“... Why are we being compelled to think about how male pianists speak? King Vidor’s A Song to Remember (1945) exerted no such pressure. Nor did Max Ophuls’s Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948). Yet, while Jane Campion’s The Piano (1993) presented a woman incapable of speech, François Girard’s Thirty-Two Short Films about Glenn Gould (1994) presented a man who was abnormally articulate – one who in the 22nd film, for example, rehearses the revealing personal ad: ‘Friendly, companionably reclusive, socially unacceptable, alcoholically abstemious, tirelessly talkative, zealously unzealous, spiritually intense, minimally turquoise, maximally ecstatic loon seeks moth or moths with similar equalities for purposes of telephonic seduction, Tristan-esque trip-taking ...”

“... his mother chose to compete for the ardour of two of Caroline’s most famous paramours, Byron and Michael Bruce. Yet his emotional dependence and lack of ruthlessness prevented him from leaving her until his family pushed him into a separation in 1825. Jibes about his subordination to women probably had a permanently damaging effect on him; perhaps the need ...”

“... brilliance of an enormous circle of flames the homage of the Seneschal in golden robes before his King.’ This is fine writing of a very particular type, hardly conducive to the equable flow of narrative and producing instead the occasional, carefully judged effect of an accelerating pace which falters before the moment of vision. It is a type of writing ...”

“... the financial and administrative strains of Charles’s war policy exacerbated relations between King and Parliament during the first five years of his reign, thus demonstrating the disruptive effect of war on Early Modern society which has been elaborated by Michael Howard and other historians. Ashton doesn’t examine ...”

“... over so much of our lives to this crap: we turn on Baywatch, we buy tickets to Eraser, we christen Michael Jackson the King of Pop and indulge him in his public psychosis (except for Jarvis Cocker, bless his heart). If our actions were involuntary – if, say, Home Improvement was forced on us in the same way that the ...”

“... significantly from the temporary release of the Balcombe Street IRA gang and the Loyalist killer Michael Stone. I remember die Kipling story, ‘The Village that Voted the Earth Was Flat’. I fear the flat-earthers and can’t be sure. Outside the headquarters of the Ulster Democratic Party (associated with the UDA) – a narrow converted shop on the ...”

“... of American resolve is in prospect, the figure of Hitler is as difficult to exclude as the head of King Charles. The drawback in the analogy is that, from a Hitler, it is impossible to demand much less than his complete destruction or unconditional surrender. Still, other keywords such as ‘expansion’ and ‘poison gas’ do keep on creeping in. Partly as a ...”

“... it was a left hook which put him away after 93 seconds (two seconds more than it took to deal with Michael Spinks last year). The Guardian reporter said the critical punch sounded ‘like an axe going into wet wood’. On TV it looked less impressive. Besides, Mailer used that image to describe the death of Benny Paret in Madison Square Garden 27 years ago at ...”

“... as a false friend to the Jews.After the war ended, Irgun violence increased. In 1946, the King David Hotel in Jerusalem was blown up, killing 91 people, while the Irgun and Sternists raided military bases and attacked trains, in a campaign modelled on the IRA’s in 1919-21 (Yitzhak Shamir, the Sternist leader who ordered Moyne’s assassination, used ...”

“... xeroxed scriptures at the urging of his host, the late Chief Jack Naiva. In the one he picked, the King, tall and strong, a hero from Wolwatu (World War Two), was sailing around the southwestern coast of Tanna, and gazed sadly out to shore. When his wife, Kwin Lisbet, asked him what was wrong, he pointed to a rock in the distance known as Nuaru, a name meaning ...”

“... in this. The United States didn’t win a war for independence against a tyrannical British king just so that two centuries later it could commune with the spirits of Cecil Rhodes and John Buchan in neo-imperialist seances alongside the set of countries bearing the queen’s head on their coins. But this hasn’t stopped certain Anglosphericals ...”

“... on the other, revived a canonical story. Narrated by one of the wicked sisters, the book retold King Lear as a domestic tragicomedy. It remains her best work. Horse Heaven, like its immediate predecessors, treads a fine line between straightforwardly adopting and debunking the forms it appropriates. There is no plot as such, but by accommodating its ...”