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“... 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 ...”

“... trace the ways in which Scotland’s national imagination was repressed, never allowed to develop freely into the sort of nationalist consciousness that by the 19th century had begun to break up pre-modern empires and unions. It was instead the Enlightenment which gripped Edinburgh’s proto-citoyens, ‘an escape from the peculiar destiny of Scotland, onto ...”

“... exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.’ The Surrealists also borrowed freely from Charcot and Freud, unconcerned about the methodological divide between Charcot’s visual theatrics and Freud’s talking cure. Charcot inspired the Surrealists to investigate hypnosis, which they practised in group sessions, as well as ...”

“... League, with the title ‘How Not to Translate Marx’. The translator he had in mind was John Broadhouse, a pseudonym for the journalist Henry Mayers Hyndman, who was notorious both for his socialism and his pronounced antisemitism (he once said of Marx’s daughter Eleanor that she ‘inherited in her nose and mouth the Jewish type from Marx ...”

“... but useful in providing provisional relief: some of these things are finely dealt with in John Wiltshire’s Samuel Johnson in the Medical World, recently reviewed in this paper. This is yet another way of being literal-minded, characteristically Johnsonian and quite remote from anything specifically ‘oriental’. Johnson’s Orient is, perhaps ...”

“... of God, as well as a history of our self-conceptions, of our utopias and terrors, and this is what John Casey provides. Casey is in many ways an ideal guide. He is bracingly conservative about the writing of cultural history, meaning that he likes texts, and chronology, and evidence. He has taught English at Cambridge for many years, and his book has about it ...”

“... hate it that the Arabs have a TV station that is free, where you can express yourself freely.’ After I met Azzam Tamimi, Louise Ellman, the Labour MP for Liverpool Riverside, made a speech in Parliament accusing him of anti-semitism, of links with Hamas and of being a supporter of terrorism in general. I got in touch with Tamimi to ask him what ...”

“... he be in a state of grace? Or had he eaten too much at dinner last night – had he tucked too freely into those plums, damsons, walnuts, cheese, to which he was so partial?’ Trevor-Roper’s charge against the Puritans is that of his hero Clarendon: the accusation of dishonesty and hypocrisy. First, there was the political dishonesty of the ‘great ...”

“... and security, that we can recognise how weird those years really were. The importance of John Lewis Gaddis’s book is that it is the first coherent and sustained attempt to write the Cold War’s history since it ended. That alone makes it hard to resist, but it is also wise and imaginative and written in a vigorous, simple English which is a ...”