“... tricks. Two hundred and fifty years after Michelangelo had earned his living as a freelancer, Joseph Haydn was still the liveried servant of a princely family. The typecasting has fluctuated according to culture, but the most telling example was the attitude in Britain in the 19th century. As the British built their empire, anything that was held to be ...”

“... was ‘Rats on the Waterfront’, the mother of all New York rat pieces, by the great reporter Joseph Mitchell: The brown rat is hostile to other kinds; it usually attacks them on sight. It kills them by biting their throats or by clawing them to pieces, and, if hungry, it eats them … All rats are vandals, but the brown is the most ruthless … Now and ...”

“... often results in efforts to make Milton ideologically acceptable to present-day liberal opinion. Joseph Wittreich has been one of the staunchest proponents of those efforts, and his latest book sums up and extends the themes of his previous work. Why Milton Matters is strong on Milton’s reception, a subject to which Wittreich has already devoted several ...”

“... rationalist, anti-clerical and republican, showing more affinity with the Co. Derry freethinker John Toland (1670-1722) than with such rosary-bead nationalists as Pádraic Pearse. After Toland, the figure that mattered most to him, historically at least, was Wolfe Tone. The rising of the United Irishmen in 1798 has long been important for republicans ...”

“... ten or so of his 17 films, he is, by anybody’s reckoning, flawless. It’s not surprising that John Ford never showed an interest; the ‘manly’ directors with whom Clift did work suspected he was gay, and, in John Huston’s case, tormented him for it. He was neither sardonic nor amused enough for Billy Wilder, but it ...”

“... but diverse answers to the diverse problems that have composed the muddle. The American journalist John Simon has for some years been writing a column in Esquire in which he takes a conservative view of linguistic change in true dinner-party fashion: opposing almost every innovation in contemporary usage, and mixing up several independent considerations in the ...”

“... what is Mr Playfair doing writing a book about him? For an answer we may perhaps turn to Professor John Taylor, who has known Fred – or rather a mate of his called Uri – from both sides. Eight years ago Uri Geller – ex-fashion model, conjurer and convicted con-man – hit out television screens with a miraculous display of spoon-bending. The effect on ...”

“... one Selznick employee thought Margaret Mitchell’s novel ‘ponderous trash’ and that another, John Van Druten, was sacked after calling it ‘a fine book for bellhops’. Well, there must be lots of bellhops. The world sales of the novel now total some ten million; and the film had already grossed $62 million by 1950. Not until the Sixties was it ...”

“... with ‘O little town of Bethlehem’ (Phillips Brooks) and ‘Dear Lord and Father of mankind’ (John Greenleaf Whittier) as runners-up. Among the works of the canonical English poets, the lines known to most people are probably those beginning Blake’s Milton, ‘And did those feet in ancient time ...’, which Parry set to music and turned into the hymn ...”

“... citing the suggestion that for South Africans ‘the rugby scrum was symbolic of the laager,’ John Nauright and Timothy Chandler enter the reservation that ‘such notions can be taken too far.’ Indeed they can. An inward-facing huddle of wagons, their occupants locked in some obscure struggle of their own, would have presented little problem to a ...”

“... to Whitehall, to the sound of ‘such shouting as the oldest man alive never heard the like’. John Evelyn went further: This day, his majesty, Charles II, came to London … with a triumph of above twenty thousand horse and foot, brandishing their swords, and shouting with inexpressible joy; the ways strewn with flowers, the bells ringing, the streets ...”

“... safe from the IRA and IRA fellow travellers. One day in the library I was reading an essay by Joseph Lee in a book called The Irish Parliamentary Tradition. (This title may seem like an elaborate oxymoron, but it was the sort of book published at that time.) The essay was about 1782 and Grattan’s Parliament, an important moment in Irish ...”

“... When the celebrated violinist Joseph Joachim visited Schumann in the asylum at Endenich, near Bonn, in May 1855, he discovered that the composer – by this time in the tertiary stage of syphilis – had been spending his time compiling an alphabetical list of cities. Nearly a year later, Brahms found Schumann doing almost the same thing: ‘I looked again at his reading matter,’ he reported back to Joachim ...”

“... as well as for stigmatism and conversing with birds and animals. Among his imitators was Joseph of Cupertino, a levitating Franciscan friar, easily triggered by prayer, who shrieked loudly before lift-off. St Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuit order, was said to radiate a blinding light as he left the ground. Reformers were not impressed. Since ...”

“... does not treat the actual life of Welles or its salient circumstances: his collaborations with John Houseman and Joseph Cotten and Michéal Mac Liammóir; his affairs with Dolores Del Rio and Lena Horne, and his marriage to Rita Hayworth; complicated relationships, usually rounded up to some sort of friendship, with the ...”