“... Racism is discussed entirely in theoretical terms by two of the contributors, Antony Flew and John Marks, and ignored or quickly dismissed by most others. Roger Scruton side-steps it and attacks the myth of cultural pluralism. No minority complaint is accorded any legitimacy. We are told that during the Second World War white American GIs were warned that ...”

“... contemporary English poetry seems to have set itself a Herculean task: one named by the Scot John Burnside in ‘Source Code’ – to ‘imagine the suburbs’, in a déjà vu in which, repeatedly, ‘the same life happens again.’ As the poem’s title suggests, the task requires the encoding of difference, of imaginary origins and ends, rather than ...”

“... community. On arriving in New York, Phebe and Mary went to live with the Broadway tobacconist John Anderson, doing domestic work in exchange for their board. Later, Mary went to work in Anderson’s shop. It was here that she began to be called ‘The Beautiful Cigar Girl’ and became a well-known figure to men involved in the marketing of words and ...”

“... The last years of Fuller’s life saw an extraordinary outpouring of poems. His son, the poet John Fuller, aware of the great quantity already published in his father’s declining years, was surprised to find a posthumous mass of additional typescripts. Last Poems,* selected by John Fuller from this cache, includes an ...”

“... arrogant display of budget that speaks of royal visitations, the finish of the London Marathon, or John Major on walkabout, prospecting for inner-city blight. But on this unearned, mint morning, the fuss is all about real royalty, indigenous royalty: one of our local princes of darkness, a cashmere colonel, is about to be boxed. A mob of expectant necrophiles ...”

“... on this occasion were the rioters themselves, killed by troops, or by gentleman volunteers like John Wilkes, or by the raw alcohol they looted from Catholic-owned distilleries. Food rioters, too, only rarely inflicted serious injury on the farmers, shopkeepers and middlemen whose prices they protested against. And industrial rioters were far more likely to ...”

“... be that actually he was out-grossing even professionally dissipated souls like Jimi Hendrix). Like John Kennedy – another marmoreal prince – he was good at being popular. But Presley’s great skill, and great shallowness, was that he could make you forget what he was singing about. Death – as in ‘Long Black Limousine’; poverty – as in ‘In the ...”

“... persecution of Catholics in the area was renewed. Hughes notes that Shakespeare’s father, John, was a recusant, and he also accepts as genuine a Spiritual Testament, found in 1784 and signed by John Shakespeare, which was a declaration of loyalty to the Catholic faith (Milward makes a convincing case for the ...”

“... hearing it spoken with his un-English, un-American accent, and reinvented as an estrangement. John Updike is a self-confessed fan, but Joyce Carol Oates, who is not, has also conducted a wonderfully ingenious argument with Nabokov in several novels including The Childwold in 1976 and her Chappaquiddick novella, Black Water, in 1992, where the question of ...”

“... cruelly short-changed. Many of the graver allegations are familiar, borrowed, for example, from John Ware’s 1983 documentary, The Honourable Member for West Belfast, which relied heavily on the evidence of Peter McMullen, an army deserter who joined the IRA and was at that time fighting extradition from the US (we aren’t told that McMullen later said ...”

“... gruel to give it a bit of flavour (dukes were in terrific form at this period). One cartoon showed John Bull presenting a shovel and a basket of bread to a starving Irish family saying: ‘Here are a few things to go on with, and I’ll soon put you in a way to earn your own living.’ (How many wags in prandial conclave did it take to think up that one?) An ...”

“... Mary and her sixty-year-old cousin Elizabeth, improbably pregnant, in the days before IVF, with John the Baptist. The Visitation is the Second Joyful Mystery of the rosary. For those who grew up in Catholic Ireland, it was also a cautionary tale: if it happened to them, it could happen to you. Later in the exhibition, which includes ...”

“... unfavourable impression’.O’Connor’s ideas about her writing were unambiguous. In a letter to John Lynch, a reviewer and an academic at Notre Dame, in 1955, she says: ‘I feel that if I were not a Catholic, I would have no reason to write, no reason to see, no reason ever to feel horrified.’ She described herself as a ‘hillbilly Thomist’: like ...”

“... the scene and at the time thought to offer the least prospect of affecting society. He reassesses John Logie Baird and John Reith. He turns up a quaint precursor of broadcasting, an entertainment telephone system, which flourished in but one city in the world, Budapest. Most pertinent to what we have been discussing so far ...”

“... are far enough advanced to canonise ‘science fiction by Kilgore Trout ... The poetry of John Shade ... The one and only Don Quixote by the immortal Pierre Menard.’ It’s a bit reminiscent of the hybrid Russian-American world Nabokov invented for Ada. Here, John Kennedy wasn’t shot in Dallas but years ...”