“... caught any of Alan Bennett’s Westminster Abbey footage? Bennett, required to audition for the John Betjeman slot, couldn’t bring himself to deliver much more than formulaic world-weariness, a drone like a miraculously articulate David Hockney impersonator. Jonathan Meades does this schtick so much better, performs himself with lip-smacking ...”

“... to his treatment of character, where the rigidity of his preconceptions undermined what he took to be his discoveries, it is not illogical that he should in general have enjoyed a critical free pass where he was weakest. Scholarship is one thing, readership another. Contrast in the reception of the two writers is not confined to the volume of academic ...”

“... the Ohio Browning has met. Reviewing its first two volumes, one of its severest critics, the late John Pettigrew, found that they didn’t make him want to modify the statement that ‘there is nothing remotely like a good scholarly edition of the works.’ It was, in fact, the problems of the Ohio Browning that made the editors of the Oxford Browning turn ...”

“... Cook, scientific director of the Grapple test series; some recent disclosures on the part of John Ward, who was employed at the British nuclear weapons laboratory at Aldermaston for six months during 1955; and a group of declassified US documents obtained by Robert Norris of the Natural Resources Defence Council in Washington. It may well be that there ...”

“... purposes. ‘The old physicians,’ Van Helsing’s colleague Dr Seward tells us darkly, ‘took account of things which their followers do not accept, and the professor is searching for witch and demon cures which may be useful to us later’. It is to the investigation of such demonic remedies that the groundbreaking work of Louise Noble and Richard ...”

“... of how a degree-less provincial could match university-educated courtly playwrights such as John Lyly at their own game. The other writer, however, dealt with French current affairs and the social position of education in a different manner: GUISE: My Lord of Anjou, there are a hundred Protestants Which we have chased into the river Seine That swim ...”

“... over for the last forty years of his life and failed to finish. When his literary executor John Callahan appended some of these jottings to the end of ‘Juneteenth’, the ‘novel’ he extracted from two thousand manuscript pages, he gave Ellison the last word: the final note reproaches the editor from beyond the grave, along with the readers ...”

“... John Lubbock, Liberal MP and social reformer (he introduced the bank holiday into law in 1871), was also the founding father of scientific anthropology and an obsessive entomologist. Of his many books, the most successful, Ants, Bees and Wasps, ran to 18 editions. In 1872, he presented a wasp that he had tamed (allegedly) to the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science ...”

“... that I would have to end it, if I couldn’t get my sentences sorted. Eventually I sorted them and took the piece to the Statesman’s office in Great Turnstile. When Karl had read it he said: ‘You’re a writer now.’ He was liable to make patriarchal remarks of that kind, and for better or worse – either way it’s a confession – I was very ...”

“... as when he cheats against an opponent in a duel: Before I could see the whites of his eyes I took aim and burnt off the priming powder on the pan lid. My opponent, assuming my musket had misfired and the touch-hole would be blocked, charged straight at me, pistol in hand, all too eager to make me pay for my presumption. Before he realised what was ...”

“... that used his services. In March this year, the self-confessed blagger turned whistleblower John Ford revealed the tactics he had used over a period of 15 years up to 2010 to obtain information illegally for newspapers; on one occasion he impersonated William Hague on the phone to get access to his bank account. Many believe that such malpractice ...”

“... a new Laure Prouvost show and Charlie Gard and Call Me by Your Name and cab drivers in Rome and John McCain’s part in the GOP vote to roll back Obamacare. And a year later, almost to the day, here is Crudo – born of accident, on holiday, like a dare – and it is already on the Sunday Times bestseller list. ‘Kathy, by which I mean I,’ it ...”

“... fictive, prospective or real (floods, kidnappings, automobile accidents, the Beast of St John); fairy tales; shopping malls, hospitals, high street stores, dinner parties, graves. All these places and events can break people, or contain those who are broken. She can even put many of these things in the same poem. ‘Sensual Pleasures’ (another new ...”

“... tears’. Kraus herself found the whole business decidedly silly: ‘From the beginning, it took an effort to hide my laughter over the howling.’The Attitudes, and the associated costumes, were expressions of the popular concept of the ‘living statue’. By wearing these dresses, women were styling themselves as figures from antiquity – cold ...”

“... an inmate’s sense of innate differences was often sharpened. When the Irish nationalist activist John Mitchel was transported in 1848, first to the hulks off Bermuda, then to a penal colony in Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), one of his greatest torments was the perception that he was being treated no better than a West Indian slave. Escaping to the US, he ...”