“... challenge to the orthodoxy’ of classical writing in this country has come, so she claims, from John Henderson – an Oxbridge man, in one way or another, for most of the last thirty years. Helpfully (‘in case you are not familiar with John Henderson’s approach’), both she and Martindale quote extensive passages of ...”

“... with a hand on his penis, as in Veronese’s Holy Family with St Barbara and the Infant St John in the Uffizi, and in at least twenty other paintings of the Cinquecento – ‘a gesture unknown to devotional art before or since’, and later deplored. Steinberg has a long and brilliant excursus on bowdlerism, the practice of eliminating or toning down ...”

“... Denis Thatcher is entirely inventable – as John Wells understood: he comes in a flat pack with easy-to-follow instructions, all the components familiar general shapes, all parts from stock, no odd angles, no imagination required. When they came up with the idea for Ikea, they used Denis Thatcher as the prototype ...”

“... than a collection of ephemeral trends in music, fashion or the visual arts. Matthew Collin and John Godfrey have interviewed many of the key figures in Ecstasy’s journey from a Californian ‘penicillin for the soul’ to a black-market leisure industry. From this material and their own experiences, they have put together a fascinating history. While the ...”

“... place. Only Luke’s Jesus is sent to the court of Herod and returned to Pilate’s jurisdiction. John, but not the others, is privy to the dialogue Pilate had with Jesus (‘What is truth?’) and John alone credits him with certain memorable sayings: ‘Behold the man,’ and ‘What I have written I have written.’ It ...”

“... in 1660 is apparent. More revealing was the seal’s association of freedom with what the royalist John Evelyn, surveying the measures of early 1649, scathingly termed ‘unkingship’. Corruption, even tyranny, are the inexorable accompaniments of monarchy because of the fawning and flattery kings always engender in others. Monarchy is dangerous since all ...”

“... of biography immortalised by one author’s comment in a Life of St Teresa of Avila that ‘St John of the Cross bit his lip.’ If Feinstein has ever come under the influence of this school, which I doubt, she has long since renounced it. When she wishes to give us a telling visual detail she selects, if not from actual documents then from very strong ...”

“... feel there is no nobility to our rain, no dignity, no beauty, none of the honour of extremity. In John Mortimer’s novel Paradise Postponed, a woman living in the country calls the doctor in a state of agitation. He arrives and asks what’s wrong. ‘That,’ she said, pointing out of the window. ‘It’s so quiet and green and it’s always ...”

“... Pater and the statistician Karl Pearson, the political economist Harriet Martineau and Dickens’s John Harmon in Our Mutual Friend – all these Victorians, real and imaginary, deliberately extinguish some aspect of their personality in order to find out a hidden (and often unpleasant) truth. Levine calls these willed acts of self-suppression ‘something ...”

“... not only because he worked hard at them, but also because he listened to advice, especially from John Gardner but also, more remotely, from Hemingway, Chekhov and V.S. Pritchett. One of the things he learned was the need for arduous revision, draft after draft. Another lesson was that the writer needs to trust the tale. Lawrence notoriously advised the ...”

“... has placed all the relevant Joycean locations in James Joyce: Triestine Itineraries. And now John McCourt, founder and director of the annual Trieste Joyce School has published a study of Joyce’s life and work in that first decade of exile, with a brief coda covering his return after the end of the war. The details offered are not often new: after ...”

“... easy way to complete the forms. The same applies to statistics from Egyptian asylums supplied by John Warnock, the head of the Lunacy Department there from 1895 to 1923. Warnock admitted to a ‘total ignorance of Arabic’, which must have made sensitive diagnosis difficult. He also diagnosed Egyptian nationalism as ‘an infectious mental disorder’ and ...”

“... that the car had at last brought a major blood sport to Britain. His fellow poet and road-hog, John Masefield, also exulted as he traversed the Downs at furious speed, his Overland emitting ‘soul-animating strains’ (doubtless from a Gabriel horn). And the man who wrote to the motoring press urging drivers not to stop after an accident if they had a ...”

“... of manifesting His power: the weaker the vessel chosen, the more obvious that God was at work. As John Newton, a Calvinist ex-slaver turned Abolitionist curate (and the author of ‘Amazing Grace’), explained, ‘the whole praise may be given to Him alone.’ Outwardly, More was a timid maiden lady, but inside she was steely: she embodied opposites – from ...”

“... muse lets rip through the rat-a-tat of Blind Hary’s Wallace; and in the brassy Reformation of John Knox it blares even in the sophisticated George Buchanan’s over-the-top ‘Elegy for Jean Calvin’. The volume remains high in some of Robert Fergusson’s sophistic-performative street-talk, Burns’s on-off, rip-roaring ‘Tam ...”