“... embrace of the award wasn’t unusual in the canon of celebrity Razzie acceptances. Brian Helgeland, who wrote the Kevin Costner post-apocalyptic Western The Postman, kept his Razzie next to his Oscar to remind him of the ‘quixotic nature of Hollywood’. Since the birth of the American film industry, as Tim Robey’s Box Office Poison ...”

“... the other three-quarters of the Beyond the Fringe team (Alan Bennett, Jonathan Miller and Dudley Moore), who would go on to present their own take on the nuclear threat, in a sketch called ‘Civil War’.In that sketch, a worried Moore listens trustingly as a succession of posh-voiced government spokesmen seek to reassure ...”

“... and Donne, through Milton and Blake and Keats, to David Jones, Gascoyne, Dylan Thomas, Nicholas Moore, to Lee Harwood’s Cable Street, Bill Griffiths’s Whitechapel and Brian Catling’s The Stumbling Block. London infected its interpreters, soliciting contributions to an open-ended project. The names of the poets were ...”

“... fact, since we’ve long been able to draw on two hefty volumes of screenplays superbly edited by Brian Henderson. What I have described as idiosyncrasies, Klawans would probably regard as complications intended to reinvigorate well-worn comic formulae. He doesn’t by any means underestimate the strength of the contempt for ‘simple-minded ...”

“... of rescuing the mind from the lofty isolation of Cartesianism. There must be some other way, and Brian O’Shaughnessy’s book is the record of a search for one. As its title indicates, it does not deal with the general question of the relation between mind and brain, nor does it cover in equal detail every type of interaction between mind and body ...”

“... by Freddie Bird, a well-respected face, who witnessed the current Mr Squires (a pre-Bond Roger Moore) doing a runner, before the bouncers moved in.Home’s praxis is the stuff of London: confrontation, violence, ‘the poetry of the inarticulate’. He was born on the southern fringes of Merton (close to the parklands once tended by the bucolic poet Chris ...”

“... The Cricketers’ Almanack has appeared on my bookshelf ever since I realised it wasn’t Old Moore with jaundice, listing the phases of the Moon or high tide at London Bridge. My entire cricket career, every over of it, is encapsulated in a row of books four feet long. The editor, John Woodcock, the highly respected cricket correspondent of the ...”

“... example involves the British anthology The Terrible Rain: The War Poets 1939-45, edited by Brian Gardner and published in 1966; not only did it exclude Gaelic work, but its sole mention of Sorley MacLean (who lived until 1996) occurs when Gardner lists him among poets killed in action during the Second World War. As the end of the 20th century brought ...”

“... is a kernel of truth to the notion of Ireland as a breeder of fantasies. Culture – from Bono to Brian Friel, Heaney to Riverdance – is modern Ireland’s most remarkable export. There is a small but impressive film industry known as Paddywood. Artists in Ireland are exempt from income tax on their work, and this respect for the arts goes a long way ...”

“... in her bed on 8 April 2013 after suffering a massive stroke. According to her biographer Charles Moore, the bill for her stay was ‘well into six figures’. Thatcher made a ‘five-figure contribution’; the rest was covered by the then owners of the hotel, David and Frederick Barclay, identical twins who appeared on the Sunday Times Rich List later that ...”

“... and savage’) to certain terms bandied about today: ‘terrorist’, ‘bomber’. Brian Friel, another of the ‘Field Day’ directors, does something similar in his play, Translations, which isn’t only about the act of translating place-names from Irish to English, but also ‘translates’ a typical British battalion in the Belfast or ...”

“... and language rather than timeless objects located in some ideal world. Russell’s friend G.E. Moore had already wowed the gilded youth of Cambridge with his doctrine that ‘goodness’ and ‘beauty’ are supernatural entities accessible only to first-class minds, and Russell was trying to do something similar for logic, maintaining that anyone clever ...”

“... things that make life worth living: write TV dramas, act, do stand-up, sing, make films or help Brian Eno make music, to list just a few of my former students’ activities. But often the terms on which the subject is defended (which broadly speaking boil down to ‘don’t worry, it will get you a job’) concede so much to the dingy gods of the ...”

“... for having made great work by such inartistic means. One is the naive artist: the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson reputedly arranged his masterpiece, Pet Sounds, by sitting all day with a small orchestra and singing each instrumentalist his part. He’d have the ensemble perform, then he’d make alterations, listen again, and so forth, until the arrangement ...”

“... which in the contemporary field had lately consummated takeovers of many artists, including Moore and Bacon, who had been nursed to fame by pioneering smaller firms. And there were specialists in contemporary art whose positions were generally now weakening, such as Gimpel’s, the Hanover and the Beaux Arts. Fraser’s was one of a batch of new ...”