“... Punch’s line. Thackeray thought the magazine had got carried away by the spectre of a crimson foot emerging from the Flaminian Gate. Writing to a friend, he said: ‘After making a great noise myself I begin to wonder why we have made so much to-do about the Cardinal [Wiseman]. Why shouldn’t he come and set up a winking Virgin in the Strand?’ The ...”

“... else, banishment rituals, designed to protect the living from the dead: explicitly, in the case of foot-binding to prevent the corpse from walking, or the Iron Age body pinned with a stake so it can’t rise up; less explicitly but just as unmistakeably in the case of burial six feet under, entombment or cremation. He quotes a 12th-century ecclesiastical ...”

“... What​ have the Romans ever done for us?’ John Cleese asks in Monty Python’s Life of Brian. His audience, not realising his question is rhetorical, replies: aqueducts, sanitation, medicine, public order, etc etc. Guy de la Bédoyère, on the other hand, doesn’t need a list: the Romans’ most important legacy, he suggests in his new book, is literacy, and specifically the habit of written memorialisation ...”

“... transfigure reality, not to reflect it – which is why, from the heretical medieval philosopher John Scottus Eriugena to Bishop Berkeley and W.B. Yeats, there is such a robust Irish faith in the imagination’s power to summon new worlds into existence. Philosophically, this suspicion of realism went hand in hand with a rejection of rationalism and ...”

“... in February 2002, just over a month after the first prisoners arrived there, shackled hand and foot, hooded and blindfolded by blacked-out goggles. Stafford Smith’s description of a hunger strike that began on 6 July 2005, ending briefly only to start again on 11 August, is harrowing. In a parody of medical care, and in violation of the Tokyo prohibition ...”

“... not much cleverer than opera plots as told by emojis, but it is nice to think about, for instance, John Adams’s Harmonielehre as a long flight from a relentless rhythmic unison in E minor via a Wagnerian prism to an ecstatic combination of a grid and a wild and dangerous celebration of E flat major. Four years ago I wrote a viola concerto – first performed ...”

“... Lover’, ‘Hill of the Bees’, ‘A Myth Enacted’, ‘Slow Bell from the High Hill’, ‘John Hunter’s Canal’, ‘The Lawn of Trees and Rocks’, ‘Quelle Histoire’, and (an unusual exertion of sympathy) ‘Dulled Son of Man’. In a poem to Ivor Gurney, Grigson, who can sometimes be magnanimous to the dead, hails Gurney as a poet of ...”

“... sun the grass hath vexed, The tawny mowers enter next; Who seem like Israelites to be, Walking on foot in a green sea. To them the grassy deeps divide, And crowd a lane to either side. With whistling scythe, and elbow strong, Those massacre the grass along: While one, unknowing, carves the rail, Whose yet unfeathered quills her fail. You can’t make an ...”

“... Susan Sontag wrote, ‘in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.’ John Donne believed that illness is the kingdom, that it steals in and corrupts our lives: ‘The disease hath established a Kingdome, an Empire in mee, and will have certaine Arcana Imperii, secrets of State, by which it will proceed.’ Both perspectives are ...”

“... Winchester as a scholar, but Edward was thought to be dim and was dispatched to Kingswood (founder John Wesley), where his father had been. It was an odd time in the public schools, major and minor. At Kingswood there was a small, flourishing Communist cell, including E.P., Arnold Rattenbury, who went on to edit the Communist cultural journal Our Time, and ...”

“... the difference between ‘beige’ and ‘bone’ at fifty yards that made her a natural diarist. John Updike said her ‘Talk of the Town’ pieces ‘helped put New York back into the New Yorker’. Her first column, in January 1954, was about a careless dry cleaner, and began the dispatches from ‘a rather long-winded lady’ whom the New Yorker heard ...”

“... summoned. His lofty earlier debates on the Agony in the Garden and Cain and Abel with his friend John Colet would have remained unknown – Colet was not one to rush into print – if Erasmus had not written them up and got them into circulation. If Colet’s new St Paul’s School was known abroad, it was Erasmus’s doing. Even Jean Vitrier, coming to ...”

“... the piece was by the Polish composer Henryk Gorecki and the words were the personal motto Pope John Paul II had adopted, by which he expressed his intense love of Mary. The piece was composed in 1987 to celebrate the pope’s third visit to his native country and to the national shrine of Our Lady of Czestochowa. The association spoiled the pleasure the ...”

“... boasts of being ‘admired of those that hate [him] most’. ‘A sicke Machiavell Pollititian,’ John Stephens wrote in his Essays of 1615, ‘is a baked meate for the devill.’ No other political theorist has received remotely similar treatment. Hobbes, who came in for a handsome share of vilification from the 1650s, was namechecked as an early exponent of ...”

“... drawing given by Haslam is ‘Pair of labourers’ cottages, North Wales, 1905 ... 3½d per cubic foot or £296 the pair’. A few pages later comes one of the earliest of his huge series of county cottage styles, the ‘Montgomeryshire Type’, with its legend: ‘Total Cubic Contents of Pair Measured Outside, 19805; Estimated Cost of Pair £372; Cost per ...”