“... for Lord Hay’s Masque – almost certainly devised by the pre-eminent artist of the genre, Inigo Jones – followed in this tradition: its action opened on a magnificent prospect of woodland, with a Bower of Flora, a House of Night and Diana’s Tree of Chastity, in front of which danced nine 15-foot golden trees. At the end of the dance, each tree opened to ...”

“... he was the one with the camera. ‘Anyone could be in that suit,’ the Guardian’s Jonathan Jones said of the picture of Aldrin. ‘It is a portrait of humanity evolving before our eyes into something new and extraordinary. It’s as if the moon’s surface has overwhelmed Aldrin’s face, or even become it.’ I’m not so sure: I see only Aldrin. That ...”

“... who play ‘the mythical game of time’. An Occidental Haroun, he wears a broad-brimmed Indiana Jones hat. He’s a role player, a trans-dimensional tourist. Hence the language. ‘Pard’, according to Jonathon Green’s Dictionary of Slang, has no existence outside the fictionalised Wild West. Moorcock is like one of those local library researchers from ...”

“... us sample questions from past papers. Wondering how Wordsworth and his undergraduate friend Robert Jones managed to miss their way at the Simplon Pass, as recorded in The Prelude, he walks the route and explains the topography. Later, to elucidate the account of ascending Snowdon in Book xiii of the poem, he puts on his boots again and pants up the poet’s ...”

“... play. Simone Weil got the boot, as did Nina Simone and Simone Signoret, Jowett (of Balliol fame), James Agate, Jane Austen, Molly Bloom, Hegel and Henry James, all of them biting the distinguished dust. 2 June. A situation on the margins of social interaction develops opposite. Working outside No. 60 is a handsome, though ...”

“... same story in different settings. On hearing the word ‘commitment’, she sought refuge in Henry James (an odd hero for a writer whose sentences are so unencumbered and who was also besotted by Elmore Leonard), but she was happy to be accused of consistency: she believed in the salutary power of memory, and the value of precedent. Consistency, after all, was ...”

“... Kermode also notices that this transgressive interest goes both ways. The proletarian writer Lewis Jones, whose novels portray political struggles at a Welsh mine, praises the enviably ‘magnificent body’ of the coal-owner’s son. Kermode’s argument is built on an implicit contrast between relations of love and relations of power, and between the ...”

“... copies in Britain in its first six months. ‘There is something almost impertinent,’ Henry James wrote, ‘in the way … Mr Stevenson achieves his best effects without the aid of the ladies.’ Was it, he asked, ‘a work of high philosophic intention, or simply the most ingenious and irresponsible of fictions’? In his ‘Decay of ...”

“... suggested that the three of them hold another meeting, bringing in the Northern Ireland leader Sir James Craig and de Valera. Nothing came of this proposal, perhaps because O’Flanagan was discredited. It is difficult for a non-historian to judge to what extent the publication of these documents will add significantly to understanding of the Treaty ...”

“... The opening line of the year’s most substantial historical contribution, Adrian Desmond and James Moore’s Darwin’s Sacred Cause, is: ‘Global brands don’t come much bigger than Charles Darwin.’ Quite right.Darwin freely confessed to late-onset philistinism: ‘My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large ...”

“... country lad, a Quaker from County Durham (‘Why, aye!’). He’s Enlightenment Man in his Tom Jones aspect, a bright, good-natured extrovert who wags his tail at all that interests him, like a friendly dog. Mason, on the other hand, is Enlightenment Man in his sombre, ‘Gothickal’ aspect. He is haunted by the ghost of his dead wife, Rebekah. He dreams ...”

“... translation, and like many people really did think of it as the standard edition. Like the King James Bible, if I can use that unfortunate analogy, it is so good – or we have been so educated to see its goodness – that it seems like the real thing. It’s true that I wondered, when Penguin first phoned me, whether Freud sounded different in other ...”

“... the unquestioning service he performs for Lord Darlington, an aristocratic English Nazi, played by James Fox. ‘Let us make a film in which the representation of fascism would engage with the fascism of representation,’ Rose writes. ‘A film, shall we say, which follows the life story of a member of the SS in all its pathos, so that we empathise with ...”

“... Willem de Kooning had a show ‘that sold out on its first day and netted $150,000’. The artist James Rosenquist caught a glimpse of Johns around this time: ‘One winter morning I walked out of my building, and along came this four-door Jaguar sedan. At the wheel was Jasper … With his first money he’d bought a coat and a Jaguar … I was happy to see a ...”

“... willing to spend more on feeding themselves than on washing. In the 1880s, Lever and his brother James – the children of a grocer from Bolton – had created Sunlight soap, one of the biggest brands in late Victorian England. The breakthrough wasn’t the soap itself, but the way it was marketed: in individual bars packaged in colourful boxes, rather than ...”