“... theories in Patriarcha, seemed intent on making himself almost literally the father of the nation? Reading this essay I was reminded of Joe Orton’s comments when the Lord Chamberlain blue-pencilled the use of Sir Winston Churchill’s penis in What the Butler Saw, substituting a metonymous cigar. ‘What am I saying?’ Orton protested. ‘That he had a big ...”

“... the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries – the Europe of Anselm, Adelard of Bath, Bernard of Clairvaux, Peter Abelard, Hugh of St Victor, Suger, Otto of Freising, John of Salisbury, Chrétien de Troyes, Marie de France, Hildegard of Bingen, Gottfried von Strassburg, Wolfram von Eschenbach, Roger Bacon, Snorri Sturluson, Leonardo Fibonacci, Aquinas and many others ...”

“... old days”’ before gay liberation. But such social critique often masks ressentiment. When Peter Wildeblood, a diplomatic correspondent for the Daily Mail until convicted for offences with two airmen in 1954, testified to the Wolfenden Committee the following year, he based his plea for tolerance on a distinction between his own discreet homosexuality ...”

“... lives, talk and attitudes of the vast majority of the population in past times belong to what Peter Laslett calls, hauntingly, the world we have lost. The Diary of Thomas Turner claims notice as a sustained insider’s account of how ordinary people lived from day to day in a pre-industrial English village. On Thursday 27 December 1756 two of Turner’s ...”

“... tall writing-desk, pacing round his furnished rooms, and checking the rhythm of his sentences by reading them out loud to imaginary audiences. But from time to time he would venture outside for a ‘people bath’, and his small, alert and slightly crooked figure was well known in the streets and theatres of Copenhagen. The philosopher of solitude and ...”

“... A friend​ who teaches in New York told me that the historian Peter Lake told him that J.G.A. Pocock told him that Conrad Russell told him that Bertrand Russell told him that Lord John Russell told him that his father the sixth Duke of Bedford told him that he had heard William Pitt the Younger speak in Parliament during the Napoleonic Wars, and that Pitt had this curious way of talking, a particular mannerism that the sixth Duke of Bedford had imitated to Lord John Russell who imitated it to Bertrand Russell who imitated it to Conrad Russell who imitated it to J ...”

“... staff. Whether I would have been quite so ebullient about it if I had known what I know now, after reading Geoffrey Taylor’s riveting book, is another matter entirely. To be sure, I knew that the dear old Grauniad was not exactly flush – my new salary would have told me that even if I hadn’t noticed that one of my future colleagues pinned his bus-tickets ...”

“... until he died in 1988 at the age of 37. He was the author of The Uses of Obscurity and (with Peter Stallybrass) The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. A collection of fugitive pieces, Carnival, Hysteria and Writing, will be published by Oxford next year with an introduction by Stuart Hall, with whom Allon studied at the Birmingham Centre for ...”

“... shot was an RA portrait-painter called Meredith Frampton, whose father Sir George had designed the Peter Pan monument in Kensington Gardens. She asked him to paint her a tree near it. He obliged, enchanted by the beautiful Canadian, but basically he was a quiet man who lived with his mother, and nothing came of it. Elizabeth was very kind to him, but ...”

“... of what was surely a generous gesture on the part of an extremely busy publisher with far too much reading and writing on his hands already, it was certainly a remarkably deliberate one. In the normal way letters are written – unless one happens to be Lord Chesterfield – because they have to be or because more or less involuntary occasion calls them ...”

“... women (Sappho, actresses, Wagnerian singers) deeply affected her fiction. In an astute reading of Cather’s early journalism and literary criticism, O’Brien traces the change from her initial Victorian view of art as masculine – she keenly admired Stevenson and Kipling – and her scorn of ‘lady writers’ who she believed ‘lacked ...”

“... praises, but that the next age thinks a masterpiece’, to jolt the Australian consciousness into reading Stead and reclaiming her. By that year she was 62 and had been publishing for more than three decades.In 1969 she returned briefly to Australia after 41 years away. On her return to London she wroteUnder the soft spotted skies of the North Sea I had ...”

“... Certainly there is no other figure from the ancient world about whom we can know so much. As Peter White demonstrates, however, in his characteristically incisive and learned book, Cicero’s letters do not provide a window into his soul, any more than the numerous letters from his many correspondents provide a window into theirs (some of them seem to ...”

“... going to happen at all, it was most likely during the futurist frenzy of the early 20th century. Peter Vergo, in The Music of Painting, examines a neglected aspect of the modernist era, when a variety of painters, poets, composers and inventors became preoccupied with the convergence of visual and aural stimuli – a utopian race towards a future of total ...”

“... great narrative altarpieces of the Assumption, the Annunciation, the Resurrection and the Death of Peter Martyr. In front of the bare altar below Bellini’s painting in S. Giovanni Crisostomo today, there is a box into which money can be put in order to illuminate the painting by spotlights. Humfrey provides a fuller discussion of the original lighting of ...”