“... without this gap, there was no place for him. In this scenario, his wives, lovers and children took a secondary role. If anything they were important because they underlined the extent to which he lived outside convention, and, in Anita’s case, because she greatly enhanced his image as a romantic and charismatic figure. All of which brings us to the ...”

“... but the sheer coincidence of a Jacobean dramatist and a legendary director sharing the name John Ford. So perhaps it takes a formalist to know one. But the contemporary formalist whose approach converges most sharply on Herbert’s is the sculptor Cornelia Parker. For a piece called Measuring Liberty with a Dollar (1998), for instance, Parker ...”

“... can you go?, asserted of the traditional Catholic teaching on sex: ‘No doubt a few Catholics who took it seriously found it oppressive; but the majority lived in cheerful disobedience.’ Well, that is what it may have looked like from the perspective of Combe Florey House and Downside, but not, I can assure Mr Waugh, from the point of view of the Catholic ...”

“... as it was problematic in theology and law. Renaissance and early modern religious authorities took a dim view of claims to know what properly belonged only to God. Drawing on Old Testament authority, the Catholic Church banned ‘all forms of divination’, explicitly mentioning ‘palm-reading’, and in some strands of Protestantism your fate was sealed ...”

“... books. She also wrote poems (much less good than the novels) and studies of Mary Shelley and John Masefield, whose narrative verse she admired. She then had a protracted bust-up with Stanford, which had its origins in what was to prove the foundational crisis in her life. In late 1953 she was taking too much Dexedrine, which she used as an appetite ...”

“... to provide whisky and cigars for his European guests (as well as slave-girls for those, like St John Philby, sensible enough to embrace Islam). He only banned alcohol for foreigners in 1952, after a British consul had been murdered by an inebriated Saudi prince. Nowadays the fleshpots of Europe provide a safety-valve for those rich enough to afford them. If ...”

“... profession and the other asylums of London (especially Hoxton) when necessary. Lamb’s brother John had urged him not to take on this task: it was typical of Lamb to say that he understood John’s reasons for saying this, and thought no less of him for it, while disregarding his advice. The history of the fate of insane ...”

“... seen. Not a few of the characters the boom brought with it were larger than life too: ex-Governor John Connally of Texas, for example, still scarred from the Kennedy shooting, hustling for oil companies and on the way down to the bankruptcy that broke him, and T. Boone Pickens, the greenmail king, so thrilled with his acquisition of the Mesa field (which he ...”

“... recognised by Eliot to be among ‘the things ill done and done to others’ harm which once he took for exercise of virtue’. Like Ricks, I had interpreted that admonitory statement about things done to others’ harm in ‘Little Gidding’ as an act of contrition by a great, self-torturing poet. Now, reading Julius, I feel a deep sense of shame at my ...”

“... lost their lives. The UDT leaders fled over the border into Indonesian West Timor, while Fretilin took control of the colony, and began to move towards formal independence, with wide popular support according to many foreign observers. The only option now left to Indonesia was an invasion, duly launched on Pearl Harbor Day, 1975, within hours of the departure ...”

“... enabling the curious reader to construct a poem which began, say, with line 1 from sonnet 7, took its line 2 from sonnet 3, its line 3 from sonnet 10, and so on. This novel procedure allowed Queneau’s 140 lines to generate, potentially, 100 million million (10 14) poems, which would take, he later calculated, someone reading 24 hours a day around ...”

“... revisions as each generation enacts its patriotic commitment in a different way. China/Avant-Garde took place ten years after the People’s Republic’s first ever show of dissident art was staged on the same site. On that occasion the show coincided with the Democracy Wall movement, which was itself echoed in Tiananmen. Both protests claimed descent from the ...”

“... the scrapping of train priority rules – seem to be entirely market-driven. Passenger trains once took priority over freight trains and fast passenger trains over slower ones. The Rail Regulator proposed in 1996 that the priority hierarchy should be abolished in order to give every train operator equal access to the system. His proposal was put to the RI but ...”

“... turboprop Gulfstream V executive jet with the registration number N379P painted on its tail. It took off at 2.40 a.m. for an unknown destination. As the Washington Post later reported, at 19.54 on 26 October, Anwar’s story was posted on the FreeRepublic.com website. A few minutes later a blogger reported the aircraft’s registered owner: Premier ...”

“... membership had been barely five hundred.) In November 1940, less than four years before it took power in Belgrade, the Yugoslav Communist Party had six thousand members; at its lowest point, in 1932, it had counted barely two hundred. How strong the Vietnam Communist Party was when it began to consider an insurrection for independence in 1941 is ...”