“... a thousand is in every street.’ Phillips is a lover of games and chance and rules. With Brian Eno – his pupil at Ipswich Art School in the early 1960s – he invented ‘sound tennis’, striking a ball against five pianos with their workings exposed, and scoring according to the sounds produced. In A Humument, Phillips deploys what he calls ...”

“... Jacob Burckhardt, who did much to give the book its status. And yet Pico’s writings, as Brian Copenhaver has persuasively shown, are in essence medieval. Enlightenment philosophes joked about fusty theologians debating angels dancing on the head of a pin: such was Pico. Voltaire described him as ‘a blind man guided by blind ...”

“... him by the militantly modern, urban Irish literati, as it is sometimes held against authors like Brian Friel and Seamus Deane. This is because in their case, but not in his, the backward glance to rural Ireland is associated with a currently unfashionable republicanism. On Canaan’s Side is a less impressive piece of fiction than A Long Long Way and The ...”

“... What​ have the Romans ever done for us?’ John Cleese asks in Monty Python’s Life of Brian. His audience, not realising his question is rhetorical, replies: aqueducts, sanitation, medicine, public order, etc etc. Guy de la Bédoyère, on the other hand, doesn’t need a list: the Romans’ most important legacy, he suggests in his new book, is literacy, and specifically the habit of written memorialisation ...”

“... but who dismiss the idea that they were sympathetic to Fascism as a ‘mistaken notion’ (Brian Inglis’s conclusion in his 1966 account, Abdication). Lady Donaldson denounces Charles Higham for retailing tittle-tattle, and concludes that if you leave out the gossip and the speculation there is nothing left in his biography which we didn’t know ...”

“... national security against another.’ The current debate surrounding the case of a former soldier, Brian Nelson, jailed earlier this year for offences committed during his time as an Army Intelligence agent inside the UDA, and the High Court action taken by the Chief Constable of the RUC against Channel 4 over allegations of a murder squad within the RUC, are ...”

“... of Hugh Gaitskell; lists were drawn up of such notorious Communists or Communist sympathisers as Brian Walden, David Owen, Robert Mellish, John Stonehouse, Roy Hattersley and Reg Prentice; and even a bogus pamphlet on ‘revolutionary strategy’ for the installation of socialism in Britain was contrived for off-the-record briefing of American ...”

“... not easy to lay hands on, and it is impossible to speak too highly of the enterprise of Martin Brian and O’Keeffe in issuing in 1978 the first real Complete Poems, which superseded the earlier collected editions as well as the thirty or so constituent volumes from Annals of the Five Senses (1923, reprinted 1930) onwards. Of this first book, which is ...”

“... revival, gathering momentum with the retrospective exhibition organised in London in 1966 by Brian Reade. The Nineties had gone underground for seventy years, resurfacing only when the hold of Late Victorian values was at last undermined, where it had long been upheld, in the courts. Beardsley’s legacy does not run through the acknowledged ...”

“... he was an employee.’ He wanted out, but couldn’t extricate himself entirely: MainMan owned the masters of all the recordings he’d made to date, and Defries was entitled to hefty royalties, in perpetuity, on everything Bowie made until their contract expired in 1982. So he wasn’t free of Defries, but perversely the ongoing constraints of his contractual ...”

“... made that ‘there had been a number of similar claims in the media and that the evidence of Dr Brian Jones’ – a senior government scientist – ‘showed that the report that there was concern in intelligence circles was correct.’9 As far as Lord Hutton was concerned, all this was neither here nor there. The ‘communication by the media of ...”

“... Is Esports opens, when xPeke pulled off a dazzlingly innovative move to win the 2013 Intel Extreme Masters in Katowice for his League team, Fnatic; or the time the fighting game legend Daigo ‘The Beast’ Umehara pulled off 15 consecutive blocks in a row to defeat Justin Wong in the semi-final of a 2004 Street Fighter 3 ...”

“... any Dublin 4 liberal.In fact, it’s a tangled web. I remember talking to Deane about the plot of Brian Moore’s Lies of Silence (1990). At one point in this thriller, a priest tries to persuade a hotel manager to say that he can’t identify a young IRA volunteer (a nephew of the priest’s) who was responsible for a kidnapping and car bombing. ‘It ...”

“... there may continue to be minor alarums, such as the recent spat over the entry for Patrick O’Brian). Nonetheless, a not dissimilar kind of sleep-disturbing responsibility fell on its editor, and the project was fortunate to find the ideal man for the job in the Oxford historian Colin Matthew, who had demonstrated his capacity for the task in his ...”

“... than his sexuality? Was his religious upbringing more important than his reading of the American masters? Were his sadness and anger more important than his love of laughter, his delight in the world? Did his prose style, as the novelist Russell Banks claimed that evening, take its bearings from Emerson, or was it, as the writer Hilton Als put it, ‘a ...”