“... hand, was genuinely strange. A high-wire walker who is artist in residence at the Cathedral of St John the Divine in New York, he is described, with a simpering smile from Dr Guntern, as conquistador of the useless. Petit is a tiny, frail man who looks like a haggard Jean-Louis Barrault. He offers magic tricks and his offences against the social norms to the ...”

“... author of The Mansions of England in the Olden Time was the artist Joseph Nash, not the architect John; the authority on Hadrian’s Wall is Robin Birley, not Robert; William III’s historiographer was Thomas Rymer, not Edward; it was in the ruins of the Capitol, not the Colosseum, that Gibbon conceived the idea of the Decline and Fall; and Rothesay is not ...”

“... for fresh marches of conquest. The ensuing adventures were narrated with devastating flatness by John Hemming in The Search for El Dorado. The gold-hunters got lost, ate grubs, grass and one another, were plagued by bugs and vampires, swelled or shrivelled or turned orange, devoured sweaty saddles in fits of salt-thirst, perished of ...”

“... he was not a ‘knee-jerk Tory’ (as Murdoch once accurately described Neil’s successor, John Witherow). He had an eye for a good story and was prepared to publish material which annoyed the Government. He engaged in a long war over the serialisation of Peter Wright’s Spycatcher – a battle he eventually won; and although in general he lines up ...”

“... In Martin Scorsese’s Casino, Ace Rothstein (Robert De Niro) remarks that Las Vegas is about ‘selling people dreams for cash’ and, in a memorable elaboration of this cliché, that ‘it does for us what Lourdes does for hunchbacks and cripples.’ Much the same has been said about the culture of cinema, and how Scorsese’s film stands in relation to its subject is an interesting question ...”

“... by an oneiric description of stray memories of his parallel lives: Tunbridge Wells, Oxford’s John Radcliffe Hospital, railway branch lines, cities visited, still to visit or best avoided jostle with Rouen’s dockside bars, fish markets, café calvadoses, the River Seine, Paris railway stations and Dieppe’s Gare Maritime, truly ‘the End of the ...”

“... of photography and sound recording) adds further terminological lubrication. In his earlier book John Donne, Undone (1986) Docherty poured scorn on Eliot’s theory of ‘dissociation of sensibility’ in 17th-century poetry, a theory which – so far as Donne was concerned – Eliot in any case quickly abandoned. Docherty’s ‘modern age’ is a vague ...”

“... Sternberg has shown how the sexuality of Christ himself figured prominently in Christian art; and John Boswell has pointed to Christian tolerance of homo-eroticism. Many scholars, most recently Edmund Leites (The Puritan Conscience and Modern Sexuality), have further argued that Protestantism developed positive attitudes towards a measured sensuality within ...”

“... this complex web of interests and arriving at a settlement will not be easy. According to John Stockwell, who ran the CIA’s covert programme in Angola during the Seventies, it was the Agency which laid the first stone in what is now an edifice of superpower rivalry. In Stockwell’s account, the Americans began funding the FNLA, one of three ...”

“... the answer would have been very reassuring. ‘Join Atomic Energy and live a longer life,’ Sir John Hill, chairman of the Atomic Energy Authority, said in 1976. Until 1984, even the Government went on claiming there had been no deaths from radiation inside a nuclear power plant. At Windscale, the nuclear plant in Cumbria which caused some local worries ...”

“... unsettling impression of being otherwise cut up. Contrasted perhaps with Moreau’s 1876 vision of John the Baptist’s head, we see in The Gross Clinic how perspective may be arranged – to disfigure figures more traumatically – by making them difficult for the beholder to figure out. A modern account of the Medusa attraction is that of the ...”

“... On 16 June 1953 an administrative session of the Paris Psychoanalytic Society passed a vote of no confidence in its President, Jacques Lacan. Lacan’s theory was at war with internationally-dominant trends in ego psychology. His short analytic sessions took liberties with practices that others saw as sacred. And in relations with colleagues, Lacan disturbed the peace by insisting that traditional psychoanalytic societies undermined psychoanalytic truths ...”

“... but not with the same exuberance or obstinacy,’ he replies. But is Marianne more obstinate than John Bull, whom the Encyclopédie Larousse defines as ‘the nickname given to the English people to indicate their obstinacy’? He gives no answer. This book is not a work of comparative history. Intellectually, it is less powerful than his earlier ...”

“... trouble in drumming up a fan club. Satanism is in this sense just the flipside of suburbia. As John Carey has observed, the grotesque freaks who populate the fringes of a Dickens novel represent the sadistic vengeance which the text wreaks on its own decorous middle-class story-line. Nobody would ask Oliver Twist to dinner if they could hook Fagin ...”

“... which he found feathering the ‘uncomfortable nest’ of another recluse, the Sydney painter John Passmore: ‘curb your magnanimity and be more of an artist.’ The ugly face of Holden’s Performance gets in the way of a more seductive writerly presence that now unfolds, years later, in Eucalyptus. This sweet-talking book sidesteps many hurdles by ...”