“... for languages or football: because it’s beautiful. I have no idea what stars were rising when Michael Wood’s The Road to Delphi: The Life and Afterlife of Oracles pushed onto the planet’s surface, but so brainy a book must have a lot of air signs in its chart. It seems at first to have been born under the sign of Aquarius: analytical, determinedly ...”

“... autumn of 1938. Behind every teacher in every classroom in every school loomed a portrait of the king and a map of Greater Romania, the perfect circle within which, according to the curriculum and the powers that be, everybody lived happily doing various things in various sorts of traditional dress.In the sitting room at home, the man on the radio who ...”

“... work of a genuinely British Bard. ‘Chief Poet!’ Keats called him, sitting down to read King Lear again, ‘Begetter of our deep eternal theme!’ Unlike revolutionary France and America, Britain entered the 19th century without the benefit of a rationalised, written constitution. But in terms of making meaning, the works of the Chief Poet served as ...”

“... of Violence at the Roundhouse. His sobering report had Allen Ginsberg and R.D. Laing, Trocchi, Michael X, and other disparate luminaries of the International Times devouring every word. We wanted to hear the worst, the spidery voice of doom: the prophetic voice of the Ancient of Days, Blake’s voice hallucinated in Harlem. We wanted to leaf through the ...”

“... philistine that in retrospect he appears almost pathetically comical. In his books on Edward VIII, Michael Bloch has washed a great deal of the Abdication dirty linen in public, and much of the mud has stuck to the Duke of Windsor himself, to say nothing of the Duchess. Sarah Bradford’s biography of George VI portrayed him as the ultimate sacrificial ...”

“... is bad in a place. This too shall pass one day.’ It doesn’t pass, however. Like the maimed king Amfortas waiting to be touched by the Holy Spear, Sebastian’s hero lives with his open wound: ‘the consciousness of the sin of being a Jew’. The error of the Jews, he reflects, is that they observe too much and think that they, too, are being ...”

“... Shaun Murphy, a solid player who was the world champion in 2005, named the retired footballer Michael Owen. Judd Trump, currently ranked second in the world, named the still-playing footballer Mason Mount. Mark Selby, who has been world champion four times and UK champion twice, said Nicko McBrain, the drummer from Iron Maiden. When the journalist asked ...”

“... Firth of Forth carrying a large quantity of gold and silver belonging to Charles I, the tomb of King Alaric I and treasure from King John’s baggage train. Oh, and the lost city of Atlantis. What Merlin Burrows is selling often seems too good to be true, but Blackburn says that its late founder, a ‘spectral ...”

“... is not outside the world he criticises, he is part of it, and so are his friends and family,’ Michael Wood wrote in the LRB of 7 September 2000: ‘Social arrangements are foolish and apparently fragile, because they are arbitrary and groundless. Everything about them could be different, and is different in other times and places … And yet it is because ...”

“... classes would soon have to live without. Six or seven years ago, only Alfred Jarry’s immortal King Ubu could have entertained the idea of the Polish State Symphony Orchestra touring 13 English towns and cities with a programme featuring a slow-motion 50-minute ‘symphony’ by a dissident composer whose name was unknown outside his native Poland. In that ...”

“... with their knowledge of current affairs and hone their interview techniques. ‘I like that Michael Howard,’ says one. ‘And Kenneth Clarke’s a good bloke too.’ Neither boy, I suppose, has ever known anything but a Tory government nor by the sound of it ever wants to. At Birmingham I have a session with David Edgar’s playwrights’ class, then ...”

“... stage production. The play was George Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer and the occasion the King’s birthday, 1789. Apparently, the convicts’ efforts to please ‘were not unattended with applause’. It is a queer little episode. The honoured king was mad. Europe itself was a little mad in 1789, one might ...”

“... came the film version of Bright Lights, Big City, an appalling adaptation with wholesome munchkin Michael J. Fox in the lead. Like the film of Less than Zero, it was neutered by Hollywood’s supine acquiescence in Nancy Reagan’s demand that movies and television should not ‘glorify’ drug-taking. The jagged blackness of the original text was ...”

“... now spiralling out of control, as Zionist violence increased. In July 1946, the Irgun blew up the King David Hotel, killing 91 people, British, Arab and Jewish. The following year, after three of its men had been condemned to death, the Irgun captured two British sergeants and hanged them in reprisal. The atmosphere grew dark; Sydney Silverman and Barnett ...”

“... Six Gallery was hardly virgin territory. The space had once been a community art venture called King Ubu, operated by the Black Mountain poet Robert Duncan and his collagist partner Jess Collins. Duncan, removing his clothes at the conclusion of his verse play Faust Foutu, in order to demonstrate the meaning of nakedness, anticipated by a decade or so the ...”