“... negative publicity? Do we think there is any guarantee that a further strengthened institutional power will only be wielded against those whose views and politics we abhor? If we say yes, what picture of power – theirs and ours – does that presume?To which​ a devil’s advocate might say: isn’t that a mug’s ...”

“... Diaries and, of course, Peter Ackroyd’s gold-brick biography of Blake. Bennett, Ackroyd and Jonathan Miller – these were the figures who mattered most. The Christmas parcels of English literature. Enough of threadbare bohemia, paranoid narcissism, chemical tourism through the Third World. Enough of ill-disciplined prose and rootless lives. Enough of ...”

“... A Little History of Poetry, ‘but in the main poetry, especially modern poetry, is sceptical of power, wealth, luxury and celebrity, and sceptical, too, of people who admire them.’ This is far from a universal view, of course: ‘The language of poetry naturally falls in with the language of power,’ Hazlitt ...”

“... the 1980 Moscow Olympics (which were boycotted by America), the first after Thatcher’s rise to power, Britain came ninth, with five gold medals, seven silver and nine bronze. They came 11th in Los Angeles in 1984 (when Russia boycotted), with another five golds; 12th in 1988 (five golds again); 13th in 1992 (five golds yet again). The nadir was reached in ...”

“... see it as a means of securing ourselves against happiness rather than arriving at it; but its power and pedigree are obvious. And whatever else it does, it places the individual irrevocably among other people and unmistakable material things. ‘Of all horrible religions the most horrible is the worship of the god within.’ And if we fail to find ways of ...”

“... interminable, incoherent TV series The Tudors. It is likely that a British audience will resist Jonathan Rhys Meyers’s portrayal of Henry VIII as camp, weedy and short. But they will believe almost anything else: that Thomas More was a martyr for freedom of conscience, that Anne Boleyn was a witch, and that the monasteries were dissolved by men on ...”

“... presenter tries to gag him – he tells the English about ‘a poem by one of your great writers, Jonathan Quick. This guy in the poem is madly in love with a woman called Celia, but he sees her commode just after she’s had a shit and he can’t take it.’ A broadcast phone call from Mrs Thatcher keeps the Russian monster on the air: ‘If one is dealing ...”

“... to the universal church. Even if we wish to “maintain our own catholicity” we do not have the power to do so except in our relations with other churches. To maintain an isolated independence is, then, to deny catholicity.’ Dr Runcie has evidently enjoyed wrestling with this problem but recognises that many will find it boring. ‘It is not ...”

“... were probably closed two-thirds of the time. Biographers, notably Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jonathan Bate, have struggled to determine the impact plague had on Shakespeare’s life and work. Did Shakespeare flee London during extended outbreaks, and so spend much of the first decade of the 17th century with his family in Stratford? Did he continue ...”

“... justification for rescue work. It may be, as Roman Jakobson believed, that its virtue lies in its power to protect us from ‘automatisation, from the rust threatening our formulae of love and hatred, of revolt and renunciation, of faith and negation’. Since the transgressive has this value it will be worth much effort to recover lost examples of it. In its ...”

“... in an argument that conceives these pastoral leases as ‘sui generis grants’, in the words of Jonathan Fulcher, ‘designed for Australia’s unique conditions’ and, to this extent, ‘instruments unknown to the common law’. In the Kimberley region of Western Australia, some Aboriginal communities live in small fenced-off ‘excisions’ on large ...”

“... or smugness. Selves, in other words, are always split hierarchically, in terms of internal power relations; the strongest parts of the self supposedly causing (i.e. coercing) the weaker parts; being, in a sense, irresistibly persuasive. As Octavio Paz says in his illuminating Introduction to A Centenary Pessoa, an essential guide to and useful ...”

“... at the Folklore Society said Lang had jumbled up genuinely ancient tales with the work of Jonathan Swift and the French fabulists, whose fairies and giants were merely their own inventions. Yet this was a literary not a scientific venture, one less interested in curating immemorial fragments than in showing readers what it was like to think with ...”

“... Act, which passed into law in May. Ahmed will work out of the Office for Students and have the power of ‘monitoring and enforcing’ regulations that impose on universities and student unions a new duty to ‘secure freedom of speech within the law’ for academics, students, staff and visiting speakers. What does this mean in practice? The Act is ...”

“... Brick, has vanished into the vault, as have Noah Baumbach’s unfinished pilot for a TV version of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, starring Ewan McGregor, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Greta Gerwig, a Ridley Scott-directed pilot for a rejected show called The Vatican, and many others.After Chase shot the pilot for The Sopranos, ten months went by before HBO got ...”