“... that it was in part written by the up-and-coming Shakespeare. Other writers proposed include Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Kyd and, most recently, Thomas Watson. According to a contemporary account of his death in 1593, Marlowe himself was knifed while playing backgammon. I have sometimes wondered if this detail, not found in the coroner’s report, was an ...”

“... retranslations of the same old texts – which is not self-evidently a good thing – we might hope that at least some of them would be done by classicists who are younger, or less white, or less male.Of course, it is quite easy for anyone, from any social background or identity, to replicate the same tired old vision of the same old texts. More ...”

“... merely a literary sensibility but a governing creed. For the Augustinian philosopher of history Christopher Dawson, fascism and liberal democracy were just two varieties of the fallen state.Although the sinister Merry England of the Distributists never came to pass, they did inspire artists who despaired of flourishing under capitalism. The sculptor Eric ...”

“... right hand. It is a kind of ritual, a purging of the past, the key representing the last physical hope of ever returning to the land that was Palestine and is now Israel. ‘Your Uncle George locked the front door,’ she said. ‘You see, we thought we would only be leaving for fourteen or fifteen days, until the fighting died down. So we took a few clothes ...”

“... hills. This is where you find Tibbie Shiel’s Inn, where the Blackwood’s boys James Hogg and Christopher North used to come to liquefy their rhetoric. We entered from a smirr of rain, snoking for supper. It turned out supper was something that happened in the glen before 6.30 p.m. A lady in a white lab coat emerged to remind us of the fact. The phrase ...”

“... Welles, Jean Renoir, Marlene Dietrich, Charlie Chaplin, Harpo Marx and many others. Brecht and Christopher Isherwood had briefly lived and worked in the cottage where I was pounding out the first draft of an adaptation in collaboration with my director, Sydney Pollack. Isherwood now lived on the palisade just above the street. The memory of this creative ...”

“... Cherkley Court, and there would open the interconnecting door between her bedroom and his in the hope that she would signify consent by leaving it ajar. Once, when he was talking about a woman with whom he (rightly) suspected Pincher was having an affair, he ‘puckered his face into a leery smile’ and declared: ‘I bet she’s got a big bush!’ Pincher ...”

“... of elegies for the dead interspersed with similes, and pares away almost all narrative elements. Christopher Logue’s dazzling paraphrases adopt a fragmentary form which appears to have been broken apart by the violence it represents, which is often grotesque (‘His neck was cut clean through/Except for a skein of flesh off which/His head hung down like a ...”

“... The radical English Protestant sects – Diggers, Ranters, Seekers and the like – applauded by Christopher Hill in The World Turned Upside Down (1972) challenged ecclesiastical hierarchies by maintaining that all matter was endued with spirit, that God was present in the fabric of nature, even that God and nature were one. No need for an external spiritual ...”

“... short distance from the centre-left to the reactionary right. In 2009, he hailed the neocon writer Christopher Caldwell, who had claimed that Muslims are ‘conquering Europe’s cities, street by street’, as a brilliant seer, who understood the consequences of undermining ‘national tradition’ with ‘liberal universalism’. It may be unfair to pick on ...”

“... the movement in which the Party was rooted had a life of its own. However often their argosies of hope foundered on the rocks of bureaucracy, Maxton, Jennie Lee and other ‘visionaries’ did articulate cries for fairness and friendship which had deeply-rooted popular support. If Labour is losing credibility as the voice of such values, it does not follow ...”

“... mechanical. Libertinism, here, is less a choice than a ‘hedonistic repetition-compulsion’, in Christopher Tilmouth’s words: ‘each kind Night returnes’ and with it the speaker and his roll-call of mistresses, until, one day, they don’t. No one, especially not the libertine, is getting out alive. The double use of the verb ‘change’ reveals who ...”

“... evanescence his match is probably to be found only among choirboys, who have, however, the hope of going on to lower things, or the Elizabethan boy-actors of female roles, a class of persons on whom Wilde’s imagination played compulsively. Wilde and Douglas were not, finally, put asunder by the savagery of society, the brutality of prison or the ...”

“... rest, is geared only to damage limitation and the remedying of disasters, it represents the best hope of avoiding litigation, not by the time-honoured devices of closing ranks and withholding information but by anticipatory planning against the occurrence of mishaps. It needs to be remembered that medicine, like the legal process, does not guarantee to get ...”

“... neither Conrad nor James would have known what to do with. In a letter to Conrad, he expressed the hope that his descriptions of trench warfare might come in handy should his eminent colleague ever decide to do anything ‘in this line’, or want to ‘put a phrase into the mouth of someone in Bangkok who had been, say, to Bécourt’. There is no sign of the ...”