“... admiration for the Poles. I remember, one Sunday morning, watching the installation of Pope John Paul II with Foucault and a friend – all three of us ex-Catholics – on Michel’s minuscule black-and-white television set. I was struck at the time by the fascination with which he watched the proceedings. Quite apart from delight in the ‘camp’ of ...”

“... is still fluid and uncertain. There are not many scholars who can turn so easily from Scaliger to John Ashbery. Modern critical writing, too, is strongly represented, much of it unknown to me. I am used to the citation of books I have never read, but the very copious notes to Kinds of Literature refer again and again to scholarly works, apparently of great ...”

“... and in his final years he also produced paintings of great pathos, but even in the Beheading of St John Caravaggio does not deepen our conviction, or raise our conception, of divine rapture or inspiration or virtue. Nor does he ever exhibit any beauty that is not mundane. The painting which perhaps best exemplifies the qualities Caravaggio lacked is The Last ...”

“... art or of accident’? That formulation is C.S. Lewis’s; Ricks goes on to examine a paragraph of John Aubrey who, he says, ‘thrusts upon us a choice between apprehending his prose as genius or as ingenuousness’. It is not a choice I have felt myself forced to make. Aubrey is a remarkable and delightful writer; ‘felicity’ – Ricks’s word – there ...”

“... led to a reconsideration of their practice as teachers. The book’s editors, Stephen Eyers and John Richmond, suggest what this work meant for them as teachers: ‘The study of language in schools is not essentially to do with the reading of reports or the shaping of policy documents (though the presence of reports and the need for statements of policy may ...”

“... of the press organs in that difficult period, was supported from time to time by the Government. John Walter II, no longer having that support, switched into opposition in 1820 and supported Queen Caroline against George IV. Whether or not his motives were disinterested, his sales more than doubled. There is nothing like sexual scandal and public passion to ...”

“... feel one still has to fight for the phallic reality ... So I wrote my novel, which I want to call John Thomas and Lady Jane ... It rather looks as if Witter Bynner was a good influence on Lawrence, as well as being a severe and witty critic. But then, to judge by these letters, he was a pretty good fellow all round. He seems to have fancied himself as a sort ...”

“... of the picture’s export from Italy was raised. Meanwhile, the attribution to Raphael made by John Shearman, the prominent Raphael scholar who was then at the Courtauld Institute, was widely challenged, sometimes in very strong terms. And then the picture had to be returned to Italy. It must have seemed as if the Museum of Fine Arts had been copped for ...”

“... is the route by which d became t?’ Changing states attract Prynne’s attention much as they did John Donne’s. Here we don’t get ‘gold to ayery thinnesse beat’ or flesh ‘calcined’ into dust. Instead we have syrups, doughs, pastries, and snow that melts into slush: images of reconstitution and dissolution. The first volume included in Poems is ...”

“... through to the country’s bookshops four years ago the notorious World according to Garp by John Irving. The result was a letter to Literaturnaya Gazeta by an enraged ‘intellectual’ who had bought the book for his teenage daughter. He intended it to help his daughter in her English studies, but instead found himself bombarded with all sorts of ...”

“... At an international conference I attended the other day someone spoke of European civilisation as the civilisation of Christendom, the Renaissance and the Welfare State. A somewhat flowery way of putting it, perhaps: but then it can certainly be argued that the Welfare State is the principal flower in the post-war blossoming of Western Europe. Moreover, the speaker presumably intended to place the modern Welfare State among the greatest achievements of European civilisation, an order transcending frontiers ...”

“... time. At one point he gently shows himself as a callow, would-be writer merely by referring to ‘John Keats and Alfred Tennyson’ – two real writers sporting their Christian names like new ties. The landlady in ‘Fate, Art, Love, and George’ is named from Oscar Wilde. She is Miss Bunbury and keeps old personal columns with certain appointments ...”

“... taxes on America, in the shape of the Townshend Acts of 1767 (to which other Americans like John Dickinson and Samuel Adams responded with ever more ingenious arguments like the right of Parliament to legislate for the colonies, as against tax them), Franklin wrote his son William ‘that no middle doctrine can be well maintained ... Something might be ...”

“... was the son of an architect who had learned his profession under the comfortably traditionalist John Nash, but his own vision, actuated by the ‘throb of possibility’ (lovely, phrase), was engaged with the architecture of the future as embodied in Fontaine’s designs. He was a practical idealist, and the heart of the novel is the fate of his dream. The ...”

“... Marsh Arabs. As well as the interview with Thesiger, there is one with another ‘post-imperial John Buchan character’, David Stirling, who added that new regiment to the Army. The interview is dated 1974, a bad year in Britain, when Stirling launched an organisation to train people to keep sewers and power stations operational in emergency. He had ...”