“... up and all the wrong way round?’ I think the answer is yes. Murdoch has used the Gawain poem freely as a source of motif and theme, as the broad inspiration for a ‘contemporary’ moral fairy-tale which need not obey the rules of realistic plotting. At any rate, the story of The Green Knight has a faintly dreamlike atmosphere, a magical imprecision to ...”

“... and Star Trek enthusiast called TCP ‘Germy’ Hinton on the Oxford leg, passing by the grave of John Dee, Elizabeth I’s court wizard, an allegorical theme-park called Milton Keynes and other centres of deep and magical significance, as they go. Why are they doing this? Because they have been sent on a quixotic chase after a texte de fétiche, a putative ...”

“... of the inauguration of an academic programme in October 1895, in two rented rooms in what is now John Adam Street. Nor is it unprecedented for someone who has run the School to write about it. One can point to the austere history of the LSE’s foundation by Sir Sydney Caine, or to what Dahrendorf calls ‘William Beveridge’s intriguing London School of ...”

“... similar to that of many recent liberals writing in the analytical tradition, such as Brian Barry, John Rawls and Charles Larmore. These writers argue that, by their nature, conceptions of the good – theocratic, secularist, vegan, carnivorous, lesbian, polygamous, socialist, libertarian or whatever – give us insufficient reason to conclude that any one of ...”

“... loomed large in 17th-century thought. Millenarians and Messianists like Isaac La Peyrère, John Dury and Peter Serrarius expected the recall of the Jews to Palestine any minute, where they would rebuild the Temple and set up a government. Arguments about whether they would return as Jews or as converts to Christianity were common. Menasseh ben Israel ...”

“... Oscar Wilde never wrote that play: the piece is a long short story, perhaps his best, which was freely adapted and transformed into a ballet-pantomime (Tanzspiel) for the occasion Schorske is throwing into relief, unaware of its central interest – to wit, the music written for the purpose. It was by Franz Schreker, has survived its age, and, almost ...”

“... ways and read into it what they would like to find. One reason for this is that, as in the case of John Stuart Mill, a writer with whom one may notice many parallels, there is something of a conflict between heart and head, and between the intellectual positions which logic forces him to accept and the ones with which he feels most at home. Although union ...”

“... came from industrialists and businessmen in Newcastle, Liverpool and Glasgow. Without the help of John Macadam and other Glaswegians, Mazzini might not have been able to mount the crucial expedition of his follower Rosolino Pilo to Sicily in 1860, which paved the way for Garibaldi and his Thousand. In Italy, the main charge against Mazzini has been that he ...”

“... of Ceres’ womb, that her reaper-lovers had got upon her – to suit their double-columned books. John Barleycorn must die a second death, when bankers rule, as Spengler shows, till Caesar comes. Jones’s skills have not exactly deserted him: there is still the historical knowledge, the talent for allusion and association, and some distinctive ...”

“... scene that has no source either in ancient accounts or in Graves’s narrative, he has Caligula (John Hurt) take on the guise of Jupiter and cut the baby Drusilla is carrying from her belly and – on the model of some versions of divine gestation and paternity in Greco-Roman myth – eat the foetus. The ‘Caesarian’ itself was not shown on screen, but ...”

“... are only the steam which obscures the Mirror of Truth.’ Such is Fish’s description of John Milton, the most obstinately argumentative of all English poets, the most heroically strenuous in matters of the mind, the indefatigable compiler of arguments and corroborative materials, whose watchword, all his life, was ‘freedom’. In an age when the ...”

“... her fault, poor dear. Twenty years earlier she might have been trading poisoned darts with John Barrymore. But she and her sorority sisters were condemned to representing a girdled, uplifted world whose only edges were in the bones and stitching of their foundation garments. Faced with so much overwhelmingly off-putting evidence, the feminists, and ...”

“... an express elevator. It is a cultivated essence of shop-window shrines and Pentecostal chapels (John Wesley with tambourines, lugubrious and off-pitch). Its own particular harsh pure green is raised and reinforced until it becomes an architecture. It is to green what a snowball is to white, an impactment. Although Brainard was raised a Methodist, these ...”

“... nor any playmate; Only an avenue, dark, nameless, without end. (‘Old Man’) It is odd, as John Bayley noted in an essay two decades ago, how frequently the poetry conveys its most potent sense of Thomas’s elusive selfhood at the very moment that self nears the brink of dissolution. This dissolution is far from the ‘extinction of ...”

“... days by the bushel and the barrel, as from stores that were infinite; we handled water-melons as freely as cocoanuts, and the amount of stomach-ache involved was negligible in the general Eden-like consciousness. Then there were the ‘bedizened saucers heaped up for our fond consumption’ at the two competing ice-cream parlours where the young Jameses ...”