“... beautiful cover illustration for The Wise Wound, the study of menstruation by Penelope Shuttle and Peter Redgrove (translated into German in 1980), shows the Grail chalice within a womb. In Syberberg’s film Amfortas’s wound is both internal and external, as in dream-logic: his tunic is bloodied at groin-level, but the wound is also carried about on a ...”

“... I will not name him. Within four hours of the explosions on 21 November five Irishmen – Paddy Hill, Gerry Hunter, Richard McIlkenny, Billy Power and Johnny Walker – were arrested at Heysham in Lancashire as they got off a train from Birmingham New Street which connected with the ferry to Belfast. A sixth man, Hughie Callaghan, was arrested the next day ...”

“... Jesi, in the Marches (fortunately, the count had hidden both his family and the manuscript in a hill village nearby). There seems to be every reason to agree with Arnaldo Momigliano, whom Krebs cites: the Germania deserves a high place among ‘the one hundred most dangerous books ever written’. Like a virus, Krebs argues, it could multiply and spread, in ...”

“... The voiceover narrative, written by Geoffrey Ward, is remorseless and untheatrical, just as Peter Coyote’s spoken narration is dry, unaccented and a little formal, as if reading out a casualty report. But Burns and Novick seem to understand how specious it would be to make this a tidy, organised report – a history – instead of attempting to ...”

“... at UCLA with several of the anthropologists on whose work he draws, including Barbara Myerhoff and Peter Furst; the university was also home to such scholars as Marija Gimbutas and Carlo Ginzburg, who had found shamanic traces in the archaeology and folklore of prehistoric and medieval Europe.This new turn displaced armchair ethnography with ...”

“... every appearance of relish. Maybe he did do that in public – the Derek and Clive dialogues with Peter Cook left very little to the imagination, so it’s not unlikely.23 March. Barry Cryer brings a good deal of old-fashioned joy into my life, as I’m sure he does for many others. His phone calls always begin, ‘It’s your stalker,’ after which without ...”

“... landscape at the mouth of the Thames Estuary. I should be out there now. I have been brooding on Peter Ackroyd’s notion that the Thames is a river like the Ganges or the Jordan, a place of pilgrimage, a source of spiritual renewal. ‘The river itself becomes a tremulous deity,’ he asserts. I carried Ackroyd’s epic, Thames: Sacred River, as I made a ...”

“... For Wearing, contemporary drama (the ‘journalism of the imagination’) was the loser. Even Peter Flannery’s triumphant mid-1990s nine-parter Our Friends in the North was shown despite rather than because of the prevailing BBC ethos. Michael Jackson, then head of BBC2, described the serial as ‘without doubt the contemporary drama event of the ...”

“... the property or the person, as Miliband could be seen, seemingly untailed, striding round Primrose Hill (and indeed the world) while the brace of bobbies still hung doggedly about his doorstep. When they do eventually depart the first casualties will be among the cyclists of whom, judging from the bikes leaning on the railings, there are many in the ...”

“... the other half is killing. Many of the men of C Company die in the extended fight to capture a hill from the enemy, but those who reach the top proceed to kill, and kill rampantly, horribly. It is then, during the massacre of the defeated Japanese, that Train is moved to ask: ‘This great evil, where’s it come from? How’d it steal into the world? What ...”

“... keeping it classy. Do you read Racine when you’re drunk? No, I read a novelisation of One Tree Hill called A Heart So True and it’s awesome, and that’s the reason I’ll never have a story in the Atlantic Monthly. There is less to say about writers who know what to leave out. Even Davis, in her introduction to A Manual for Cleaning Women, seems ...”

“... a dinner of sea urchins, ‘heaped in a great armorial pile … like the unexplained detail on the hill by the thistles and the hermitage of a quattrocento background’, followed by a plain grilled loup and no potatoes, was ‘one of the most luminous and moving expressions of the impact of the Mediterranean that I know’.There are other, deeper reasons for ...”

“... in the distant city of Argos, The Eumenides is set where the play was performed: in Athens, on the hill of the Areopagus, a stone’s throw from the Theatre of Dionysos. The dominant characters are not humans but gods. Orestes has come to Athens for sanctuary, to beg Athena for absolution from matricide. Athena, like Clytemnestra in Agamemnon, is the ...”

“... in 1880, and set at an angle to the main road from Hampstead into town, on the corner of Hampstead Hill Gardens, one of those circuitous side-roads designed to fit buildings into an existing road network and acting as a short-cut to nowhere. The front is Victorian Gothic, in creeper-strangled red brick, with a pointed, many-faceted, slate-tiled roof which ...”

“... Stella, Noland, Louis, Frankenthaler, Olitski, Poons; his Britons, Caro, Tucker, Latham, Hill, Hockney, Richard Smith, Bernard Cohen, Denny, Hodgkin, Ayres, Buckley, while his one European was Pol Bury. So Kasmin’s choice was focused on abstraction, with Hockney as the joker in the pack, where Fraser’s was wider, though with an emphasis on ...”