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“... Anita Bryant, and a great surge of (horribly popular) homophobia. Anita Bryant was a singer turned Christian crusader, and she and her supporters managed to get gay rights – that is, the rights of gay people to be people like anyone else – repealed in Minnesota, Florida, Kansas and Oregon. As I understand it, this situation does not resemble that of other ...”

“... to Justin de Villeneuve, Twiggy’s manager (and formerly a Mayfair hairdresser under the name Christian St Forget). On a trip to New York in 1969, Killip was diverted for a second time, by the work of Bill Brandt, Walker Evans, August Sander and Paul Strand.He returned home, worked in his parents’ pub and began documenting a place that was still, via ...”

“... photographs would. Although less obviously so than most of the portraits he is famous for, Maika, Christian Schad’s Holbein-precise portrait of 1929, is a document of life in the bohemian interstices of the city. So are Nan Goldin’s colour photographs of friends in New York and Paris in the 1990s. Kollwitz and Schad interpret; they are telling us ...”

“... through anxiety and depression. Most mornings, the car that took him from his home in St John’s Wood to the Observer offices near Fleet Street would divert to Sigmund Freud’s old house in Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead, where Freud’s daughter Anna still saw patients. There, Astor would spend a daily analytic hour on the couch attempting to ...”

“... for thirteen pence a day. Yet there is an unmistakable authenticity about Housman’s work. John Bayley starts his explorations by emphasising Housman’s pessimism, and this is not a mere set of ideas: it had grown from a personal disappointment deep into the roots of his mind. The Martyrdom of Man (1872) – Winwood Reade’s reach-me-down history of ...”

“... course of twenty years in the mid-19th century a group of British explorers – Richard Burton, John Hanning Speke, David Livingstone, Samuel Baker (with his wife, Florence), Henry Morton Stanley and James Grant – slogged out on their respective expeditions through East and Central Africa, and engaged in an intense and bitter battle over who exactly could ...”

“... the tense problem of the modern muse and the sexual prompt of modern art’, or that John Updike is largely concerned with ‘the revelation of form, the moment of aesthetic revelation in the contingencies of life’. Bradbury is just going through the motions, hastening from name to name, reciting worn-out academic phrases, too bored even to ...”

“... rationalist, anti-clerical and republican, showing more affinity with the Co. Derry freethinker John Toland (1670-1722) than with such rosary-bead nationalists as Pádraic Pearse. After Toland, the figure that mattered most to him, historically at least, was Wolfe Tone. The rising of the United Irishmen in 1798 has long been important for republicans ...”

“... It bears witness to acts of brutality characteristic of Western European forms of conquest and Christian missionary zeal in Africa, the Americas and Europe, and traces the beliefs, dressed up as science, that produced and attempted to justify this brutality, right of conquest and dispossession. This means moving from the Crusades to the many genocidal wars ...”

“... detective’s talent for noticing the deceptiveness of the taken-for-granted in his defences of Christian belief in a secular world. Some people began to wonder if there were something saintly about him.After his death in 1936, Chesterton was neglected by English departments more interested in The Waste Land than in rollicking ballads of the English ...”

“... aristocracy, his contempt for all other classes, and his pleasure in reaction. But then, so John Bayley observed, they move an amendment. In order to explain these aberrations, they explain that Waugh was a disillusioned romantic. Graham Greene wrote that ‘he is a romantic in the sense of having a dream which failed him’: his first marriage, the ...”

“... of my childhood. 10 February. Finish with some regret Frances Spalding’s book on the Pipers, John and Myfanwy, the latter figuring in The Habit of Art where she is to some extent disparaged. I’ve always been in two minds about Piper, liking him when I was young with his paintings ‘modern’ but representational enough to be acceptable, a view I ...”

“... doctrine definitively trumpeted by Milton and Locke, and knocked into some sort of final shape by John Stuart Mill? Even before you get to today’s remix of the debate, you cannot help noticing two features of it. First, the zealots today are no longer the progressives on the left – liberals, socialists, trade unionists. Instead they are predominantly on ...”

“... his most celebrated poems were written from literal translations supplied by James Hardiman, John O’Donovan, Eugene O’Curry, John O’Daly, Edward Walsh, Samuel Ferguson and other sources. It is impossible to know how Mangan could have written so many poems and essays in a few years beset by ...”

“... or cruelty – or, more starkly, as eating people – is the central theme of Marianne Wiggins’s John Dollar. Her remarkable novel takes up the ancient story of the fall in paradise, and rewrites it in the bleakest terms. This is a book that makes William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, the most eminent of its literary forefathers, look like a study in ...”