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“... most radically innovative poet now writing to extend his readership. Prynne has been compared with John Ashbery, but there is little of Ashbery’s canny slackness of tone or perspective. The poems, by contrast, are dense and alarming; where Olson conceived of the poem as an ‘open field’, Prynne is inclined to think of it as a battlefield, as in ‘Die a ...”

“... from the 1848 Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood to the 1880s ascendancy of Leighton, Watts and Burne-Jones – a massive insular detour? Wasn’t Millais, as the Royal Academy’s most popular hit producer, the epitome of an age of evasive imperial complacency? Mainstream art history places him as a stumbling-block on the path to a British Modernism, berating ...”

“... to leave France in the face of royal prohibition, they continued to be busy and productive. John Houblon, from a Huguenot family which had arrived from France in a slightly earlier wave of Catholic persecution, became the first governor of the Bank of England in 1694 and a knight of the realm; until 2014, his luxuriantly bewigged features adorned our ...”

“... though his analogy was the bell jar rather than the greenhouse – and proved experimentally by John Tyndall in 1859. In the 19th century it could be seen as unambiguously a good thing: if carbon dioxide and other trace gases didn’t trap heat in the atmosphere, the earth wouldn’t be warm enough to support life as we know it. But there is now far more ...”

“... seeing it as a great opportunity, and so the production went ahead, with Mona Washbourne, Gemma Jones and Brian Cox in the other parts. I didn’t attend many of the rehearsals. I still wasn’t certain that one should. The question had not arisen in Forty Years On since I was there anyway as a member of the cast. Practices differ. Some playwrights attend ...”

“... Kathleen Glynn, who has produced all his films. Next came his disastrous editorship of Mother Jones, the muckraking San Francisco magazine, from which he was fired after five months (Moore says that there was a disagreement about how to cover the Sandinistas, but it seems that Moore had also alienated most of the staff and consistently failed to meet ...”

“... meant that others remained with the side long after they became the focus of attention. One was John Fashanu, an astonishingly crude player and an extremely articulate man, who went on to achieve further fame as a TV presenter and further notoriety when he was implicated in a match-fixing scandal from which he was eventually acquitted (he currently presents ...”

“... of Mansfield’s ‘wife’, the ever-devoted Ida Baker whom Mansfield referred to variously as ‘Jones’, ‘the Mountain’ and ‘the slave’, whom she said often she hated and once said she thought of shooting with her revolver, and whom she would not allow to touch her. This modern ‘we know better’ tone in dealing with the elderly survivors seems ...”

“... for taking bribes. Edwards was known to drink with one messenger, his fellow Welshman William Jones, and probably greased other palms. His luck ran out in 1696 with The Anti-Curse, a broadside poem attacking the ‘damn’d rebellious brood’ who ‘basely did King James depose’, which attracted a heavy fine and three alarming hours in the pillory. His ...”

“... points are the Greeks, the Gothic of Chartres, the Georgian terrace and the English Renaissance of Jones and Wren, which are admired but not venerated. Wren appears inside St Paul’s, a Baroque feature in himself with curly wig and generous embonpoint, surveying the dome through a spyglass. Arriving at the present, Lancaster watches it go past on the ...”

“... a uniter, not a divider,’ said George W., the candidate who spoke at the segregated Bob Jones University. Not according to the map: the division preceded the vote, but the vote confirmed it. The results also show a gender gap. Thank God women have more sense than men; too bad there aren’t more of them, or they can’t vote twice. Bush rode ...”

“... a stetson, jodhpur-like trousers and tall leather boots. He looks like an Edwardian Indiana Jones, or some strange dystopian scoutmaster living half-wild in the woods. Fellow explorers described him as having an ‘indomitable will’ and ‘infinite resource’, a man ‘in hand to hand combat with the wilderness’. In Conan Doyle’s South American ...”

“... where no sun shines;/Where no sea runs, the waters of the heart/Push in their tides,’ Glyn Jones, a sceptical friend, ventured that it ‘probably expresses something pretty trite and commonplace, in prose terms, about the foetus and the pre-natal state’. That puts it harshly, but Jones was shrewd to pick up on the ...”

“... political history this century, from Rufus Isaacs to Horatio Bottomley to Maundy Gregory to John Poulson, is littered with great corruption stories. The explanation for the increase in sleaze under Thatcher and Major is not to be found in any particular scandal, nor in the sudden susceptibility of certain individuals to corruption. Contemporary sleaze ...”

“... the country in search of old records that a handful of them – Skip James, Son House, Mississippi John Hurt – were ‘rediscovered’. They became draws on the coffee-house and festival circuit, while recordings by John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, who had made their names playing house-rocking, amplified ...”