“... sensation for the devotional reader on encountering a text written on parchment, with the words of John 1:14 – ‘And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us’ – thrumming in their ears. After the hair is removed, the skins are dried and stretched across a frame, known as a herse. The word comes from the French herse, meaning a harrow, and ultimately ...”

“... Hollis, also out of a job, created his best-known and most widely disseminated work: the cover for John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (1972), the book that accompanied the documentary series. (Berger had taught Hollis drawing as a student, and Hollis also designed a striking jacket for his novel G.) The first episode opened with Berger wielding a Stanley knife in ...”

“... in the 1960s and 1970s. When visiting Duchamp on holiday in Cadaqués, Richard Hamilton and John Cage would try to avoid having to meet Dalí, whose villa was close by, and their hauteur is still felt by art historians and curators: Dalí was marginalised at the Hayward Gallery’s Undercover Surrealism exhibition in 2006, and at Tate Modern’s ...”

“... These measures will probably reappear in new legislation. Lord Walney (formerly the Labour MP John Woodcock, now a crossbench peer) claimed that the protest clauses in the Bill were ‘designed to protect the primacy of our democracy’. How odd, then, that they were not in the version put before the democratically elected Commons. Instead, the unelected ...”

“... affect the outcomes of the pandemic are nothing to do with the policy choices made by leaders. As John Lanchester wrote in the LRB (16 December 2021), the UK population is older and more obese than that in many other countries, and we live in crowded cities and have an unequal society, all of which makes us, collectively, more susceptible to Covid-19. On the ...”

“... for best picture but not best director. The best director award that year – 1940 – went to John Ford for Grapes of Wrath. In practice, Selznick was not quite as straight or naive about these things as he liked to sound, and he often showed a quirky taste for visual invention. But he did like verbatim quotation from the literary texts he bought, and ...”

“... novel about the content of these pictures. One showing a donor looking at a representation of St John baptising Christ is not very different in its basic theme from a painting by Titian half a century earlier. Donors were included, as they always had been, in order to invite the spectator to remember them when praying before the image. As the innkeeper in ...”

“... to hide away. Franco takes the tiny chimpanzee home, supposedly for a day or two, but his father (John Lithgow), suffering badly from Alzheimer’s, is much drawn to the creature, who happily stays with the family. They call him Caesar, but that’s only because someone has been peeking at his future destiny as ape leader. Having discovered that the ...”

“... result-based frame of mind be as simple and total and empty as is suggested by this film (and the John le Carré novel it is based on)? Is the working principle of the war on terror that real terrorists can keep at it as long as lots of accused terrorists are picked so that everyone seems busy? Only asking. The film is slow at times, and like the novel is ...”

“... a seminary, first for Catholics and then for Anglicans. Although the fellowship included John Foxe, whose Actes and Monuments (1563) was, for several centuries, the bestselling English book after the Bible, there were few scholars of note. But then the purpose of Oxbridge colleges in the 16th and 17th centuries ‘was to impart knowledge, not to ...”

“... etc. In the 1970s the wealthy businessmen and members of the Clermont Club Teddy Goldsmith and John Aspinall (the latter more concerned for his captive tigers than their keepers who were occasionally killed by them, and for nanny murderers than the murdered nanny) started the Ecologist magazine, supported by Laurens van der Post (spiritual mentor to the ...”

“... Knossos, Italian violins, paintings from Uccello to Gainsborough, intricate dead clocks. Like Sir John Soane’s Museum in London, the Ashmolean was its own exhibit: a museum to display an essentially 18th-century collectors’ museum. That’s all gone. Behind the mighty old façade, the new design is more like MoMA in Manhattan. Piranesi with the lights ...”

“... practical of men, it seems. His wife, Esther, the tough one, had two goals, the art historian John Rewald wrote: ‘to make friends happy while at the same time running his life by any means she could think of’. Together she and Lucien produced the 30-plus books printed by the Eragny Press, the subject of the current exhibition at the Ashmolean (until ...”

“... in other words, with teacher-student (or teacher-staff) romance. Not only Roth and Coetzee, but John L’Heureux with The Handmaid of Desire, Charles Baxter with A Feast of Love and Tim O’Brien with Tomcat in Love. Even Angela Argo is writing a novel about a teacher-student affair. She is writing it for Swenson’s class. And as she writes it, she lives ...”

“... of the Sedley and Osborne families there, and later made it the scene of the sale that followed John Sedley’s bankruptcy, the sale at which Becky Sharp was outbid by Captain Dobbin for Amelia’s little square piano. (Building began in 1800, so Becky Sharp saw the square when it was quite new.) It would be, at best, a cosmetic exercise. There are too many ...”