“... the one hand, he was a kind of comedian, a learned buffoon, a butt for courtly wits and poets like John Donne and Ben Jonson, who both knew him well. On the other hand, he was the immensely tough and courageous traveller, whose remarkable journeys through Europe and Asia were made almost entirely on foot. This is the boast entailed in his favourite description ...”

“... A piece of ass is two bucks and the swimming is great in the summer.’ In the early 1960s, John Hopkins, a graduate of Princeton, kept diaries of his visits to Paul and Jane Bowles: ‘Their intimacy is more fraternal than sexual. They live in separate apartments, one above the other, and communicate by a squeaking mauve toy telephone.’ Jane fell in ...”

“... against the authoritarian powers of China and Russia and has found an influential reader in John McCain, an old-style promoter of American toughness. But it’s now quite hard to imagine Hu Jintao and Vladimir Putin, not to mention Osama bin Laden and other ‘enemies of the Free World’, quivering at the thought of a ‘concert of ...”

“... using fMRI – notably, Semir Zeki – have pointed art studies in a significant new direction. John Onians and Barbara Maria Stafford, both art historians, certainly think so, though Neuroarthistory and Echo Objects argue the case in quite different ways. What might the far view be, from this new bend in the road? Suppose we could arrive at adequate ...”

“... a bit of a kid in person, too. Adam Roberts thoughtfully includes among his appendices a memoir by John Addington Symonds in which he records the impression of something ‘almost childish’ about Tennyson’s metaphysical opinions, and you can see what he means: ‘I do not know whether to think the universe great or little,’ he records the great man ...”

“... into a full-blown paranoid belief that the security services were plotting a coup against him. John Major was not far behind. He would leave a cabinet discussion to go and read the latest edition of the Evening Standard in the anteroom, then come back to suggest they begin the discussion again in the light of what the Standard was saying. In his memoirs he ...”

“... Morgan in 1889, by one of the Wilson sisters, Emilie Barrington, in 1915, and finally by Norman St John Stevas between 1965 and 1986. Prochaska chose to present Bagehot in the first person ‘because I thought Bagehot could speak more vividly of his life and mind than I could as an intermediary in a conventional biography’. I rather sympathise with ...”

“... Venables; Alan Tierney, a Surrey police constable who was paid £1250 for passing information that John Terry’s mother had been cautioned for shoplifting, and Ronnie Wood for assaulting his girlfriend; and Tracy Bell, a pharmacy assistant at Sandhurst, who had sold five stories about Princes William and Harry in 2005 and 2006 for around £1000. The arrests ...”

“... now just for Macmillan. In time, the Aubrey-Maturin books became a cult property. Iris Murdoch and John Bayley were fans, and every now and then a laudatory notice would appear in the TLS or the LRB, for which O’Brian wrote in the 1980s and 1990s.*His life began to change in 1989. Starling Lawrence, an editor at W.W. Norton, read a borrowed paperback of the ...”

“... conceal these links. It even instructed Crown forensic scientists – as one was to testify to Sir John May – to alter their statements to remove reference to the evidence which connected the Guildford and Woolwich offences to the other crimes. At the unsuccessful appeal of the Guildford Four in 1977, the Court of Appeal was content to accept the truth of ...”

“... first part of this article comes from the journal. In addition to interviewing Victor Pasmore and John Piper, whose art he admires, although with qualifications, Fuller has interviewed Anthony Caro on his work for, and relationship with Henry Moore, although he believes that Caro has done great damage to British sculpture. In the fourth issue he prints Grey ...”

“... citizen to overthrow tyranny. After 1688, Sidney’s radicalism, like that of his contemporaries John Milton and John Locke, was posthumously emasculated. Though his arguments were used to criticise Whig practices, their basic function was to defend Whig principles which 1688 had diluted and made respectable. Sidney and ...”

“... withdrawn, and had seven bishops sacked. When the new Papal Nuncio, Monsignor Roncalli (later Pope John XXIII), went to plead the cause of Catholic schools, he took with him a map of France with all the under-funded Catholic schools marked in red. De Gaulle sent him packing: ‘This map is the map of France. It is therefore up to the French, and not a foreign ...”

“... in ways that augur a good deal. Nonetheless, his poems, like those of Zephaniah, Amryl Johnson and John Agard, need to be read aloud to have their full impact. A white British reviewer should be cautious about praising West Indian poets for their music and rhythm, but the point is only MacDiarmid’s over again: these poets rely heavily on sound to break down ...”

“... 1581 was the young dramatist. The major new fact with which Honigmann backs up the theory is that John Cottom, who was for a time a schoolmaster at Stratford, appears in the same will. Both Hoghton and the schoolmaster were Catholics; and there is evidence that Shakespeare’s father was a recusant. These factors would help to explain why Shakespeare might ...”