“... period. By the mid-century touring exhibitions were taking some popular English pictures such as John Martin’s Great Day of his Wrath as far as America. Frith’s Derby Day even reached Australia. Hyperbolic publicity was circulated which boasted of the time consumed in making these pictures, the painstaking search for ‘authenticity’, the number of ...”

“... Patience is a mark of the classic, according to Frank Kermode. ‘King Lear, underlying a thousand dispositions, subsists in change, prevails, by being patient of interpretation.’ It follows that a work of art is not a classic if it insists, apparently, on being read in one way. By that criterion, Ulysses would appear to be a classic. Joyce relentlessly explicated it, and gave his fans the authorised version of its structure, but the user’s manual doesn’t limit the ways in which the book may be read ...”

“... the City Government and the New York Police were doing something right. It is easy to forget that John Lindsay, still burdened with one of the most harshly negative public reputations among American political figures, was hailed in 1968 as the politician of the future, the man who had kept the city cool and who offered hope that the liberal experiment for the ...”

“... poets such as Jeffrey Wainwright and Paul Muldoon; there has also recently been the odd case of John Fuller’s The Illusionists, a novel in the stanza of Eugene Onegin which expertly takes on much of the wit, melancholy and technical fluency of Pushkin’s poem. ‘Out for the Elements’ is also in the Pushkin stanza, but differs from Fuller’s poem in ...”

“... between priests and laymen on jurisdiction over the other world. When the Civil War came, John Aubrey recalled, ‘Liberty of Conscience and Liberty of inquisition’ arrived too, and ‘the phantoms vanished.’ In characteristically utilitarian fashion, the Society for Psychical Research set about classifying apparitions in terms of whether a ghost ...”

“... Spanish American literature, finally to reach the enormous audiences they deserve. Already, John Fowles in a Guardian essay has used the Chronicle to great effect as a prism through which to see the battle for the Malvinas. No doubt the Sun will shortly advise its readers to do the same. No doubt Sandy Woodward is a fan of the tale of Colonel Aureliano ...”

“... metropolitan art-and-journalism. The title is allegorical and so is the name of the painter, John Worth. The title is also the name of Worth’s controversial new picture, in which he depicts Jesus with a skinhead haircut, standing on the pillion of a motorbike, congratulating himself like a football hero, while the fans rip off branches from ornamental ...”

“... intrigue which is, of course, an intrigue plotted and carried out by men. An epigraph from John Berger’s Ways of Seeing underlines the fact that men are expected to act, while, by contrast, ‘a woman’s presence ... defines what can and cannot be done to her.’ In this context, the judgment suggests a double interpretation. On the most obvious ...”

“... demands our own. This is least surprising in Hinde. Ethology in the modern sense, and not John Stuart Mill’s, the study of animal behaviour, is self-evidently a biological science. And insofar as it concerns itself with non-human animals, it has no agents’ accounts to contend with. Least like a novelist, therefore, certainly least like a bad ...”

“... The vision had sent it up a blind alley, from which Wittgenstein, Heidegger and, above all, John Dewey could rescue it if only it would listen. The hope for the future, he suggested, lay in Dewey’s vision of a culture no longer dominated by a hierarchy of disciplines (which had placed science in an aristocratic position, maintained by philosophy ...”

“... pioneer works as S.E. Rasmussen’s astonishingly innovative London: The Unique City (1934) and John Summerson’s now-classic Georgian London (1945). So influential have these books become that, in retrospect, their novelty and audacity are hard to appreciate. But at the time of publication, they were milestones in the history of architecture, showing how ...”

“... A Mr Jay, of Nettlecombe, near Watchet, Somerset, wrote c. 1670 an essay modestly entitled ‘A Fool’s Bolt soon shott at Stonage’ (i.e. Stonehenge). It begins: A Wander Wilt of Wiltshire, rambling to Rome to gaze at Antiquities, and there skrewing himself into the company of Antiquaries, they entreated him to illustrate unto them, that famous monument in his Country called Stonage ...”

“... Every pilgrim who ascends the Acropolis is seized by the splendour of the Parthenon, its ruined elegance, its marmoreal serenity. But the pilgrimage is secular: although we know that the Parthenon was a temple, we do not experience it as a numinous haunt of the gods. The power of its finished form is now perhaps beyond imagination: but it may be doubted whether even the vast chryselephantine statue of Athene which it housed – and which was, by all accounts, incomparable in its vulgarity – added any awfulness to the place ...”

“... Accompanied by a growing pile of political books, I spent most of September and half of October travelling from pillar to post and from party conference to party conference – from Blackpool to Torquay to Dundee to Bournemouth and back to where we began in Blackpool. For years now I have set out on this dismal pilgrimage filled with hope and health and holiday sun, only to return filled with alcohol, tobacco fumes and hot air ...”

“... like Bolivia or Paraguay. De Gaulle said that Chile was ‘the pilot country of Latin America’. John Gunther wrote in 1967 that Chile was ‘one of the most civilised countries in the world’, and that the general line of government was ‘roughly that of the New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt or even the British Labour Party’. There is not a hint of such ...”