“... other consists (or did in 1971) of playgoers for whom the theatre has never been the same since John Osborne, and if they don’t like a play they leave it in droves. Indeed, it sometimes seems that their chief pleasure in going to the theatre in Brighton is in leaving it, and leaving it as noisily as possible. In Beyond the Fringe the seats were going up ...”

“... along with Catholics and Jews. Violence against the institutions of state, on the other hand, took the form, not of frontal assaults, but of symbolic attacks on ‘soft’ targets, as Fischer himself notes. It was the scale rather than the direction of Stormtrooper violence that disturbed Hitler and his respectable allies. This is an important ...”

“... Eventful Years in Paraguay and Edward East wick’s Venezuela; also – a fact first announced by John Halverson and Ian Watt – that the ‘life story of an American seaman’ which Conrad claimed to have found on a second-hand bookstall and to have helped him to find his plot, was On Many Seas by Frederick Benton Williams. This latter identification is ...”

“... legally in the United States, so there was no merit in doing heavy work on the text. When Judge John Woolsey lifted the ban on the book – 6 December 1933 – Bennett Cerf set about issuing a new edition. But the text he gave his printers was a copy of Samuel Roth’s facsimile pirated edition, printed in New York: its errors remained to corrupt Cerf’s ...”

“... has come to be called a ‘degenerate research programme’. In moral philosophy this abandonment took the form, by and large, of turning away not only from the logical positivists’ answers but from their questions too. Instead of proposing alternative accounts of what moral assertions were, the generation that started writing in the Sixties and Seventies ...”

“... of Pastoral – and since I have never read its chapters in sequence, I chose the first method: took the book as a book and then went back to the essays and reviews. The result was not just intriguing but moving. It’s true that The Dyer’s Hand is not systematic criticism, or systematic anything, and Mendelson reminds us that Auden ‘never explained in ...”

“... far and wide, until every family catches infection from it.The idea of England as endangered took root. Preserving proper boundaries, keeping England white, was seen by many as a priority. Two years later Long published his three-volume History of Jamaica, in which he argued that black people were essentially different from and inferior to white ...”

“... 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 ...”