“... but how many musicals are great films? Or, speaking of moments, the killing of Jack Palance by Alan Ladd in Shane is exquisite, but Shane as a whole is a phoney. (But its director, George Stevens, did direct a musical that’s a serious candidate for greatness: Swing Time.) And the problem of evaluating the makers is vastly complicated, as it is with the ...”

“... Arthur Mitchell, who farms in the Ixopo area of KwaZulu-Natal among the beautiful hills in which Alan Paton set Cry, the Beloved Country. He said that he’d bought the farm mainly because he wanted to build it up for his son, Michael, who worked alongside him. But a month ago he’d driven into Ixopo to get some provisions when the farm radio in his bakkie ...”

“... well-read men of different generations. There is rather too much cricket for my own taste, but Alan Ross – perhaps the only writer on cricket I can assimilate – is extolled early on as ‘the first poet’ to report an MCC tour in Australia. Hart-Davis, professionally involved, has naturally a special point of view, and a wider tolerance (seasoned with ...”

“... badly than they wanted any aspect of the complicated and ongoing story he’d worked to bring to light. Only the Guardian was publishing substantive material on GCHQ and the NSA. The government had circulated a Defence Advisory Notice, an official request – not enforceable but usually adhered to voluntarily – that ‘further developments’ on the ...”

“... if they take on all exceptions to their rule. Inspired by their reading of social anthropology, Alan Macfarlane and Keith Thomas explained the increase in accusations of witchcraft in early modern England as a result of late 16th-century social and economic change. Steadily, though, incongruent cases gathered in drifts, even though there was only a modest ...”

“... his life,I thought of his cataracts ablaze with Heavenand radiant with the sight of his dead wife,light streaming from his mouth to shape her name,‘not Florence and not Flo but always Florrie’.I thought how his cold tongue burst into flamebut only literally, which makes me sorry,sorry for his sake there’s no Heaven to reach.I get it all from Earth my ...”

“... Art Scene in London, which featured several of her paintings. Its curator, the art historian David Alan Mellor, had been fascinated by the subject in general and by Boty in particular since, as a 13-year-old, he saw Ken Russell’s television film Pop Goes the Easel. Shown as part of the arts series Monitor in 1962, it purported to follow a day in the life of ...”

“... closely, not just because of Chris, or because it was a little of my own past that was coming to light, but because I recognised the names of some of the ex-pupils and teachers who spoke to the press: those who were happy to get stuck into the lying and smearing, but also those who defended him. I kept getting reeled in by things I half-recognised, things ...”

“... though one of her legs was two and a half inches shorter than the other. In the 1930s, the young Alan Turing went skinny-dipping off the rocks, photographed by an enthusiastic housemaster.Sark’s appeal remains its rugged coastal scenery, sunshine, peacefulness, birds, butterflies, dolphins and absence of carbon monoxide. Artists have come for 150 ...”

“... pre-Christian (and not especially evil) pagan deities. ‘Lucifer’ comes from the Latin for ‘light-bearer’, a sobriquet commonly applied to Venus (and on occasion, Mercury). Belzebuth is better known as Beelzebub, the ‘Lord of the Flies’, which would appear to be an insulting mistranslation into Hebrew of the name of a Philistine god: the original ...”

“... blow. The episode seems to have been the target of contemporary satire: ‘And it was only a light punch’; ‘Indeed it was, by Jove; if you hadn’t held back, your arm would have smashed right through the animal’s hide, bones and guts.’ Alexander was disgusted, Lucian says, with Aristobulus’ fabrications and threw the volume in the ...”

“... to the world of non-being. The Manichees declared that there were two worlds, the world of light created by God and the world of darkness created by the devil. Augustine himself became a Manichee for 11 years because he was disturbed by the existence of evil in a world made by God. Only gradually did he come to believe that God created everything and ...”

“... is easy to see the plausibility of Williams’s account. We need only call to mind a passage from Alan Clark’s diaries. Clark, himself a second generation fringe-Bloomsbury figure, priding himself on his ‘irreverence’, records two occasions on which he broke into tears. The first was when he shot a heron which had been attacking the fish in the moat at ...”

“... this little book are mostly and merely stupid, or mostly and merely boring. But a gruesome little light is switched on behind the glaucous eyes when O’Brien comes to his closing stave, which is a veiled tribute to Nietzsche. Quoting himself from an earlier incarnation, he writes in a synthesis of the worst of Camus and the worst of Sartre: The advanced ...”

“... which can do quite a bit to illuminate the culture in which they were formed. The cold, harsh light which is supposed to be exposing all sorts of unsavoury things about Laura Riding’s person can thus be turned outwards, to expose these very myths of sexual voraciousness, self-preservation, aggression, ambition and intelligence, not in general, but in ...”