“... merely how the game sometimes has to be played.The means they ultimately chose was to rally around John Major as the person best placed to stop Heseltine. Thatcher reluctantly came to accept this and therefore to accept the ostensible reasons they gave for her stepping aside. Very soon she would regret having fallen for it. Yet it had been clear for some time ...”

“... fear of retaliation. Fairies may have been more at risk from scholars such as Robert Burton and John Aubrey, who sought to identify them with the classical godlings. Aubrey claimed that Robin Goodfellow was simply the god Faunus in disguise. Burton defined fairies as ‘terrestrial devils’ in The Anatomy of Melancholy, grouping them with the Greco-Roman ...”

“... themselves into trouble. Last year, Jo Shuter, the former head of Quintin Kynaston Academy in St John’s Wood, was banned from teaching after admitting to widespread misuse of public funds – using school money for taxis, phones and a great many flowers, plus £7000 for her 50th birthday party and £8269 for a boutique-hotel jolly for senior staff. The ...”

“... in his own day could be accounted Powell’s leading champion. In a front-page spread in the TLS, John Bayley hailed him under the banner of ‘A Family and Its Fictions’. There was a conflict in Powell, he explained, between the Gothic and Gallic sides of his imagination, which lent much of the richness to his work – provided the former, with its better ...”

“... going into the city.’ People are moving in the opposite direction to find housing, according to John Ryan, who runs the Manchester office of the homeless charity Shelter: ‘People on the average wage can’t even dream of living in Manchester anymore, so are having to move out to places such as Rochdale, which then places pressure on the housing market in ...”

“... X when he ghosted his autobiography? To what extent did Ted Sorensen create the verbal manner of John F. Kennedy when he wrote Profiles in Courage, a book for which the future president won the Pulitzer Prize? And are the science fiction stories H.P. Lovecraft ghosted for Harry Houdini not the best things he ever wrote? There would be a touch of all this in ...”

“... of Moscow and the dominion of the world. Americans are readily alarmed, sometimes even panicked. John Foster Dulles, who worked for Truman and then became Secretary of State to Eisenhower, with a single-mindedness matching Mao’s lashed together a ring-fence around China, designed to contain the eastern end of the presumed Sino-Soviet monolith as Nato ...”

“... First published in France in 1817, the princess’s prison journal was translated into English by John Wilson Croker in 1823. Croker noted that several passages are obscure, and one or two contradictory: there are frequent repetitions, and a general want of arrangement. All these, which would be defects in a regular history, increase the value of this ...”

“... drink of?”’ The text is Mark 10.38; the context Christ’s answer to the request of James and John that they may sit with him in glory. He says the seats in glory are not for him to give, but also, rather forbiddingly, that they will indeed get to drink of the cup he drinks of. In the secular framework of the novel, though, the voice is surely saying that ...”

“... saw little reason to take scripture neat. Both Hufeland and the Scottish political statistician John Sinclair reckoned the patriarchal ‘year’ to be three months, making the oldest man who ever lived only 240. Human beings were still thought to live less long than they once did, but Old Tom Parr and a few others of his sort continued to be cited as ...”

“... large figure paintings (including Golgotha, a shtetl crucifixion, with the figures of Mary and St John based on his parents), one enthusiastic critic said it was ‘as if by mistake, the works of a child, truly fresh, “barbaric” and fantastic, had landed there.’ When his work was shown in Berlin two years later the response was even more ...”

“... nor any playmate; Only an avenue, dark, nameless, without end. (‘Old Man’) It is odd, as John Bayley noted in an essay two decades ago, how frequently the poetry conveys its most potent sense of Thomas’s elusive selfhood at the very moment that self nears the brink of dissolution. This dissolution is far from the ‘extinction of ...”

“... is rather shy of strict definitions, but what he seems to imply by the usage is a phenomenon, as John Addington Symonds put it, ‘recognised by society and protected by opinion’. And the generic implication of the capitals is no accident. Athenian Homosexuality he sees as ‘timeless and unchanging, recognisably the same thing in the sixth, the fifth and ...”

“... their slaves, their excesses of despotism. At the same time even a light-hearted impresario like John Rich was aiming at targets closer to home, as Bridget Orr explains in an essay on the Oriental theatre. But it was the example of Scheherazade that the writers who flocked to ventriloquise Oriental tale-tellers took to heart. The most obvious lesson absorbed ...”

“... Having seen the TV programme on which it was based I’ve been reading Britten’s Children by John Bridcut. Glamorous though he must have been and a superb teacher, I find Britten a difficult man to like. He had his favourites, children and adults, but both Britten and Pears were notorious for cutting people out of their lives (Eric Crozier is mentioned ...”