“... beautiful cover illustration for The Wise Wound, the study of menstruation by Penelope Shuttle and Peter Redgrove (translated into German in 1980), shows the Grail chalice within a womb. In Syberberg’s film Amfortas’s wound is both internal and external, as in dream-logic: his tunic is bloodied at groin-level, but the wound is also carried about on a ...”

“... his bleeding face, and if we are as severe as these editors, and if we want to keep that moment (Peter Brook, for example, didn’t), we have really to accept a version of the play that lacks over a hundred lines found only in the Folio. The General Introduction ably defends these editorial principles, and along the way gives a very lucid and engaging ...”

“... scarlet raincoat to show her naked body decorated with tomato cans on her breasts, fastened with green string, and a small birdcage containing a live canary as a necklace. Elsa died in Paris, from the gas fumes of an oven – it’s not clear whether or not she committed suicide. Years later, Barnes tried to retrieve her death mask in order to use it as an ...”

“... of Ecstasy, a juvenile descendant of the Winged Victory, also closely related to Loie Fuller and Peter Pan, first perched upon the bonnet of a Rolls-Royce. By the Thirties architecture had begun to envy the sleek and aggressive forms employed in modern cars and ocean liners especially. We can see this from the spectacular perspectives hanging on the stairs ...”

“... lookout for the Evil One, who roams around like a roaring lion, looking for someone to devour (1 Peter 5.8). We were looking for ‘decisions’ for Christ, or rededications at the very least. We preached the good news. We believed that Jesus meant it when he said I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one goes to the Father except by me (John 14.6). We ...”

“... was about as Spanish as a boil-in-the-bag paella. She was baptised Elizabeth Rosanna Gilbert at St Peter’s Church in Liverpool on 16 February 1823, though she was probably born two years earlier in County Sligo. Her father, Edward Gilbert, was a soldier. Her mother, Elizabeth Oliver, was the product of an illegitimate union between Charles Silver Oliver, an ...”

“... crisis had never gone away; memories of the disorder of the Civil War and Interregnum were still green. Peers and Commons were united in their struggle to exclude a Catholic heir to the throne, while the travelling roadshow organised by Shaftesbury and Buckingham around the King’s bastard son, James, Duke of Monmouth, was playing to rapturous ...”

“... ideal situation, with the lavender bank just coming into bloom and the trees and grass fresh and green after a week or two of rain. It’s one of the perfect places of the earth, utterly silent and private, the twitter of a hawk the only sound. And it’s the last time we shall be able to come. It’s a warm afternoon and with no one around I swim dutifully ...”

“... when I see the assistant gazing in horror at my hands, the fingers stained the virulent yellowish green I’ve been sponging on during this last week. As a young man my father smoked quite heavily and his fingers were stained like this by cigarettes – and a nice brown it was, and one which I wouldn’t mind seeing on the wall; if he were alive still and the ...”

“... Evelyn Waugh was the greatest English novelist of his generation. Certainly Graham Greene, Henry Green and Angus Wilson thought so, although they and not he won the worldly honours Waugh would dearly have loved. On the other hand, that redoubtable holder of the Order of Merit, J.B. Priestley, did not think so. But then whom would he have ...”

“... release, were given a ‘fast track’ introduction to the Party. Soon after leaving prison, Leo Green, for example, became director of the POW department. Similarly, Jim Gibney was given the role of Six County organiser within a short time of his release. Green, Gibney and other prisoners not only lent status to the ...”

“... a fancy pipe bomb. After she and Hellman manage to reduce some sorrel leaves to a ‘thrashing green potion’, Mahoney turns off the machine and tries to pry free the blade in order to wash it. When it suddenly pops up in the air and lands harmlessly on Hellman’s foot, the scene turns to geriatric slapstick: Her head tipped forward, seemed to wobble on ...”

“... he wrote up in Remote People, one of several good travel books of this period. (Indeed, along with Peter Fleming’s Brazilian Adventure, Waugh has some claim to have invented the modern travel book.) He took to Addis Ababa during the celebrations, its ‘tangle of modernism and barbarity’ giving it a ‘crazy enchantment’ that he likened to Alice in ...”

“... attention as they had devoted to the Falklands conflict. Instead of names like Bluff Cove, Goose Green and Mount Longdon, they became familiar with pits like Shirebrook, Manton and Bilston Glen. All good boy’s own stuff. Thatcher herself was clearly not averse to this sort of thing: her special adviser David Hart sent her a typically vainglorious note as ...”

“... most powerful man in the world a good contest: ‘They misunderestimated me’ versus ‘The green belt is a Labour achievement and we mean to build on it.’ (And on the other side of the argument, there’s Arthur Scargill: ‘My father still reads the dictionary every day. He says your life depends on your ability to master words.’) The fact that ...”