“... by the distinction of a cast that included Beatrix Lehmann, Arthur Lowe, Nicol Williamson and John Osborne. Nicol Williamson, who played the lead, was no farceur and seldom wrung a laugh from the audience, whom he chose to intimidate rather than entertain. Very shaky on the words he would pause lengthily, snarl ‘Yes?’ and stare malevolently at the ...”

“... ELEPHANT’s SPUTUM’ or to come up with obscene parodies not just of works they hated, such as John Pudney’s revered war anthem, ‘Johnny Head-in-Air’: Wail not the luck of Johnny shagged-to-fuck; he died as quick as Johnny got-no-prick. but also of poems which, deep down, they admired, like Hardy’s ‘Afterwards’: When the Gents has received ...”

“... universalism it deplores, rather than a genuine alternative to it. Stanley Fish is the flipside of John Rawls rather as tribalism is the terrible twin of globalism, or the view from nowhere is inevitably countered by the view from us alone. In this respect, Fish is a fully paid-up tribalist who, like Slobodan Milosevic, champions a unique people moulded by its ...”

“... one merits Norman Davies’s unqualified approval. It is an arresting retrieval from oblivion. John Lingard’s eight-volume History of England (1819) has been thinly, if ever, read during the last hundred years. But, written by a Catholic priest, it escaped the grip of both nationalism and Protestantism. It gave, uniquely, something like a global ...”

“... was time to pull down their cowshed and build a visitors’ centre. At the Vatican, however, Pope John Paul II disregarded a petition to complete Hildegard’s formal canonisation process (aborted in 1243) and declare her a doctor of the Church. Evidently, this most uppity of medieval women is not a model the Pope wants to raise up for emulation in the new ...”

“... on 10 October 1970, as things are quietening down, Feyerabend – no fan of his Berkeley colleague John Searle – describes the draft of Searle’s book on the crisis in the universities as ‘marvellous’. And that he considered saying in the preface to Against Method: ‘I am for anarchism in thinking, in one’s private life, BUT NOT in public life.’ It ...”

“... It takes a special man to resist Hilda von Einem. A German spy in John Buchan’s Greenmantle (1916), she is a ‘known man-eater’, who tries to inspire a rising of ‘Muslim hordes’ against the British Empire. ‘With her bright hair and the long exquisite oval of her face she looked like some destroying fury of a Norse legend ...”

“... something else is going on. James is discussing what he calls the ‘marvellous outpourings’ of John Addington Symonds – two years later, thinking of Symonds in connection with the trial of Oscar Wilde, James calls them ‘fond outpourings’ – which constitute a privately printed pamphlet on love between men. ‘The exhibition is infinitely ...”

“... who affirms that he would have been ready, if necessary, to appoint Gordon Brown rather than John Smith as his chancellor in order to achieve this end. It is an intriguing thought that Brown might have become chancellor five years earlier than he actually did. First reactions must be that, as chancellor, it would not have done him much good. He would ...”

“... scholarship, has the better of this debate. It has been convincingly shown that the martyrologist John Foxe’s admiring account was based on good evidence. In less than a fortnight of the spring of 1536, and almost in two days, the world of Anne Boleyn fell apart. The queen was charged and found guilty of multiple adultery, and all too soon she, together ...”

“... he does not call these pieces poems.’ From the heart of the London literary establishment Sir John Squire described The Waste Land as a poem for which ‘a grunt would serve equally well.’ Eliot’s 1925 collection, which included ‘Gerontion’, seemed to Squire ‘obscure so inconsequent . . . Why on earth he bothers to write at all is difficult to ...”

“... underlying emptiness. He invented one experiment to test the idea that later became the basis of John Guare’s play Six Degrees of Separation, getting students to try to make contact with someone a world away by asking only one close friend for a further contact until the designated person was reached. It turned out that generally it required a maximum of ...”

“... that painters would have anything left to say about the observable world. It was only while in John Grierson’s employment – collaborating with Auden, Humphrey Jennings and Britten – that Coldstream rediscovered a private, ‘regressive’ zest for painting, working out of hours on ‘a craze for doing heads and faces’. Whatever rationale could be ...”

“... eating. A number of summers ago my friend Eli and I had dinner at a trendy downtown pizza place (John F. Kennedy Jr was at the next table). After we’d finished, and I was halfway out the door, Eli called me back, in a strangely delighted tone of voice, to show me the dead, foot-long sewer rat (grey, oily belly distended, chest flattened, long yellow ...”

“... speak for the Australian electorate? The impasse proved too much for the governor-general, Sir John Kerr. Although his authority was constitutionally questionable, Kerr broke the stalemate by ousting Whitlam, dissolving both houses of parliament, and calling a new election. The shock waves from this (ab)use of the royal prerogative continue to reverberate ...”