“... 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 ...”

“... John Wieners​ once told his nephew he had met the Virgin Mary. ‘Did she say anything to you?’ Walter asked. ‘No,’ John said, ‘she doesn’t know how to speak.’ He paused. ‘But she’s learning.’ Wieners was born to a working-class family outside Boston in 1934, educated by Jesuits, and spent formative periods of his youth in New York, San Francisco and Black Mountain, North Carolina ...”

“... sunrise at Stonehenge. How was that image created? The Stonehenge connection goes back to John Aubrey, who first recognised the monuments at Avebury in 1649 and then spent nearly fifty years writing and talking about, but never quite finishing, his projected Templa Druidum. He was followed by William Stukeley, Anglican clergyman and ‘pagan ...”

“... a peerless library, Greek and Roman sculptures, seventeen Raphaels and a garden designed by Inigo Jones. Denmark House, as Somerset House was called when occupied by Anne of Denmark, had a fountain thirty feet high and eighty feet wide: ‘a huge rocky re-creation of Mount Parnassus’, with a cavern containing the nine muses in marble and four streams ...”

“... the magnificently goofy series of games jointly produced by Lego: Lego Star Wars, Lego Indiana Jones and Lego Batman. They are perfect games for an adult and a child to play together, and the recasting of the characters in the form of animated Lego lets a child play with things with which he is fascinated but of which in the movies he’s scared; it’s ...”

“... Allowed to read this work, Juliette, who had come on a bit, suggested it should be retitled ‘John Thomas and Lady Jane’, an idea which Lawrence liked but his publishers resisted. Trouble began when Julian on a voyage to Africa met a pretty American girl in the ever-fatal Red Sea. It was to be no passing fancy and he demanded that his wife should rise ...”

“... Loach and Leigh, Powell and Pressburger, Lean and Reed, the Boultings and Woodfall (although Tom Jones does get a long and interesting discussion here). Or at least, that’s the way this book might have been seen fifteen years ago. Now, in fact, many of the works he writes about have been canonised, none more so than the ‘unholy trinity’ of folk horror ...”

“... an editor and publisher. In 1961, she founded the mimeographed magazine Floating Bear with LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka). The pair were arrested for circulating obscene material in the ninth issue, but were eventually acquitted – Baraka helped persuade the grand jury by reading from the decision in the trial of Joyce’s Ulysses – and the magazine continued ...”

“... of titillation and myth. She records them, and her feelings, in an open, detached manner. Brian Jones, incapacitated by drugs, pursued other ways to penetrate her body: ‘I found it fascinating and frightening.’ Of Morrison she says: ‘We hit each other because we were drunk and we enjoyed the sensation.’ Both Morrison and ...”

“... to name only a few. Yet almost at once there came rumblings from Cambridge. Maurice Cowling, John Vincent, Andrew Jones and others rightly emphasised the Victorian politician’s relative autonomy from popular pressure, and cleverly unveiled the feebleness of provincial and popular reformers when they tried to operate ...”

“... In 1993 John McGahern wrote an essay called ‘The Church and Its Spire’, in which he considered his own relationship to the Catholic Church. He made no mention of the fact that he had, in the mid-1960s, been fired from his job as a teacher on the instructions of the Catholic archbishop of Dublin because he had written a novel banned by the Irish Censorship Board (The Dark), and because he had been married in a register office ...”

“... pretence must be diabolic. ‘Whatever holds down and confines the senses to the earth,’ John Calvin wrote, ‘is contrary to the covenant of God.’ Calvin’s Swiss contemporary Heinrich Bullinger inveighed against miracles as requiring ‘the help of witchcraft’.Aided by statements such as these, zealous Protestants forced distinctions between ...”

“... through anxiety and depression. Most mornings, the car that took him from his home in St John’s Wood to the Observer offices near Fleet Street would divert to Sigmund Freud’s old house in Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead, where Freud’s daughter Anna still saw patients. There, Astor would spend a daily analytic hour on the couch attempting to ...”

“... a matter of natural and wholesome professional sympathies. Stella Tillyard is married to historian John Brewer who helped Schama with Citizens, as the author warmly acknowledges in the Introduction; and there is further scholarly harmony in the fact that Tillyard, in her Preface, shows that she agrees with the views of Schama, and, increasingly, others, about ...”