“... of Christian freedom. Less obvious still are the references to Hebrew legend and to what D.P. Walker has called the ‘Ancient Theology’. Professor Screech shows that the story of Pantagruel’s ancestor the giant Hurtaly, who survived the Flood by riding astride the Ark, is derived from a rabbinical story of Og, King of Bashan. He also suggests that ...”

“... is dark and slippery and began by turning the former hero, Jim Phelps, long and suavely played by Peter Graves, into a faintly smiling villain played by Jon Voight. This did not go down well with everyone. Martin Landau, who was the master of disguise in the television series, said the original show ‘was a mind game. The ideal mission was getting in and ...”

“... woman? In what form would the embryo be found in the afterlife after the Day of Judgment? Caroline Walker Bynum has made abhorrent corners of Catholic metaphysics her speciality. After remarkable work on the mortifying practices of female mystics in the Middle Ages (Holy Feast and Holy Fast), she has turned her attention to another aspect of early and medieval ...”

“... organiser, tells us about her year spent recovering from residual infatuation with ‘Perfect Peter’ (the specious creep who dumped her the year before) and falling in love with nice, kind, attractive Andy. These books are not exactly works of literature. They do not aspire to be. They aim instead to replicate the easy, jokey, demotic tone of girl ...”

“... and yet the climber is plainly exhilarated to be there. In 1919, Graves the walker found himself still sizing up the hills like a battlefield, unable to stop himself working out where to place the Lewis-guns for an assault on some lonely farm. But in the poem, ‘fear and shock’, or sudden death from the sky, mean ...”

“... years later, she married a future postmaster; they had three children – Basil and Winifred and Peter. She published a few stories in magazines, and was sneered at by her husband’s relatives. In her sixties she wrote three books which made her famous as an articulate inhabitant of that strange planet, the countryside. The books in the trilogy called Lark ...”

“... him seriously. His opinions would be ridiculed as those of a ‘dinosaur’ if they came from a Peter Taaffe or Alan Woods, but he is inoculated against such criticism by his youth and avoidance of jargon. In many respects, he is the best thing to happen to the non-compromised, non-New Labour left in the mainstream media in decades: he makes ideas that are ...”

“... of magic, and partly to the historical researches of scholars like Frances Yates, D.P. Walker and Peter French. In Renaissance Magic and the Return of the Golden Age, John Mebane offers an inclusive, deeply researched overview of the subject. He examines the many component parts of Renaissance occultism. It ...”

“... why Lord and Lady Wilde paid those school fees. Merlin Holland’s essay on his grandfather in Peter Raby’s Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde illuminates these appropriations by charting a series of significant errors through multiple versions of Wilde’s history. Holland takes us back to one of the most familiar scenes from the life of Wilde: the bad ...”

“... V & A. Following the example of his father, Sir Joseph Joel Duveen, who commissioned W.H. Romaine-Walker to create the Turner Wing (the first Turner Wing, opened in 1910), Joseph Duveen had already paid for the new modern foreign galleries and the Sargent Gallery, which were inaugurated in 1927 (also partly the work of Romaine-...”

“... and corrupt. For many, the conference was a social occasion. ‘This is my holiday,’ Andy Walker, an avuncular former policeman, told me. He was manning the stall for Yorkshire and the Humber in the bustling membership enclosure. The previous night, he had been drinking with Lee Anderson, the MP for Ashfield and another host on GB News. ‘We’re the ...”

“... a group of artists whose work Greenberg summarily dismissed as kitsch – among them, Grant Wood, Peter Blume and Andrew Wyeth – should be seen in a line of descent from Le Douanier Rousseau and Chirico, artists Greenberg at least took seriously. Menton was struck by the sharp focus of Magic Realist paintings, their creation of a toylike world which strikes ...”

“... make up by espionage. Even comparatively low-level spies like Geoffrey Prime in Britain and the Walker family in the United States are sometimes able to provide priceless technical intelligence. There is recent evidence that from 1976 to 1983 the KGB was able to read France’s diplomatic traffic with its Moscow embassy by bugging an embassy teleprinter ...”

“... British polity. To celebrate the launching of the Institute of Contemporary British History, Peter Hennessy and Anthony Sheldon have edited an engaging collection of essays on post-war British governments, starting with Paul Addison on the wartime background to Attlee’s success, and ending with some surprisingly detached reflections on Mrs Thatcher ...”

“... in 1974. On the wall is an advertising calendar, ‘Textile Town Holidays 1974’, from Charles Walker and Sons, Beta Works, Leeds. Listed are all the vacation variations of Yorkshire and Lancashire, from the largest cities down to the smallest towns, Clayton le Moors, Littleborough, Tottingham, Todmorden, most of the works long gone, one long holiday ...”