“... In late June 1963, the front page of the Daily Mirror had a banner headline: ‘Prince Philip and the Profumo Scandal – Rumour Is Utterly Unfounded’. Excited readers scanned the story in vain for what the rumour might be. The Prince Philip ‘allegation’ was a perfect example of the knife-edged skill the ...”

“... poems appeared he appalled friends by marrying Jane, the daughter of a stable keeper, and then got Philip Webb to build the Red House for his family just south of London. Although once canonised as the first modernist dwelling on account of its simple layout and truth to materials, Morris described it as ‘very medieval in spirit’. Perhaps too ...”

“... and striding through the world and brutally altering the way things are seen: knocking the ball out of the park, as they say. The kid in the picture is not wearing glasses for fun, he needs them, so we are witnessing someone in the process of having their vision impaired or disrupted. Which is actually how quite a few people ...”

“... Shoeless Joe, Robert Coover’s The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop., Philip Roth’s The Great American Novel and Bernard Malamud’s The Natural. It was the last two of those novels I kept thinking of as I read Chad Harbach’s highly entertaining, intermittently excellent, unapologetically masculine The Art of Fielding, a ...”

“... as punishment for looking into Persephone’s box of beauty, but revived by her lover, Cupid. John Philip Kemble revived Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale in 1802 with his sister, Sarah Siddons, in the role of Hermione. At the end of the play, when Leontes is introduced to a statue of the wife whom he believes to be long dead, Siddons, draped in neoclassical ...”

“... the gossip from Plante. It’s not exactly news – everybody knew Spender swung like a wrecking ball – but literary gossip, when it comes to it, is always more about individual views than actual news, and Plante purrs the details as if there could be no worldly difference between having friends and having material. Let’s applaud him, though. So many ...”

“... to consider possible ricochets and reverberations, the baffled indignation when you see the ball hit the back of your own net. A delicious own goal was scored recently by the Labour MPs who nominated Jeremy Corbyn for the party leadership in the hope that he would draw off left-wing votes from the opponents of the candidate they actually wanted ...”

“... has traversed these paths, he has imagined Leigh Fermor’s experience of Easter with storks, a ball in Budapest, horseback from Budapest across the Great Hungarian Plain, a camp of gypsies, Great Bustards in Vesztö, the Archduke Joseph in Békéscaba, love-making (I divine) with some girl in Transylvania. Leigh Fermor’s method is to share cognition with ...”

“... Margaret would be Regent until Charles turned 18. As amended, it would now provide for Prince Philip to fill the slot. It was a clear demotion. The yellow press, in an early and faint-hearted version of mutinies against discretion still to come, asked John Bullishly why a foreign-born consort should assume precedence over a daughter of King George VI. But ...”

“... have mastered the intricacies of the Belgrano affair. Julian Haviland, Anthony Bevins and Philip Webster of the Times would all pass with first-class honours any finals examination in Belgrano Studies: but as members of the House of Commons Lobby, they necessarily have to give their attention to every ephemeral political event and could not devote ...”

“... by an enigmatic figure, whom Panofsky identified as King Herod but Koerner, citing Lotte Brand Philip, sees as ‘the Jewish Messiah arrived as Antichrist’ already at the Nativity, noting that ‘Christians expected Antichrist to be temporally ubiquitous, circulating through world history.’ That a fiend often lurks behind a friend is a lesson Bosch ...”

“... with curlicues of marijuana in his hair. Randall Jarrell’s five-line poem ‘The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner’ must be one of the best-known American poems about the war: From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State, And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze. Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life, I woke to black flak and the ...”

“... chairs very reasonably in an antique shop before going round the much larger antique centre in Philip Webb’s parish hall. 6 January. Papers full of Charles Kennedy being, or having been, an alcoholic. I’d have thought Churchill came close and Asquith, too, and when it comes to politics it’s hardly a disabling disease. Except to the press. But less ...”

“... And yet Connolly’s reputation is probably as high as it has ever been. Nice one, to be sure. Philip Larkin once wrote that Connolly was ‘at his best when able to assimilate his subject into the scenario of his own temperament’. But for connolly such assimilation was compulsive. Almost everything he wrote was touched with woe-begone ...”

“... own, over the capons and teal. What changed on 4 May 1557 was incorporation: a charter endorsed by Philip and Mary granted the Stationers a nationwide monopoly on printing, and the right to seize, burn or amend illegal books; to buy and sell property; to bring lawsuits in court; to gather whenever they wished; and to elect a master and two wardens every ...”