“... called it ‘an unmitigated mockery of Eisenstein’s intention’. The British documentary maker John Grierson’s verdict on Thunder over Mexico was that ‘the clouds and the cactus will pass for great photography among the hicks.’ ¡Que Viva México! has had a complex afterlife. The Sinclairs extracted two more shorts from the footage – Eisenstein in ...”

“... of ‘deference to the authority of Leibniz’, combined with a short-sighted mistrust of honest John Locke, might be responsible for the ‘striking contrast between the characteristical features of the continental philosophy . . . and those of contemporary systems which have succeeded each other in our own island’. By that time various posthumous ...”

“... most populous city in the world. The mood is one of retrospective nostalgia (the translation is John Whaley’s): Twenty years I let time run And enjoyed the lot I drew; Unmarred lovely years, each one, Like the Barmecides once knew. Goethe also borrows motifs and tropes from Firdusi and Rumi: their verse is erotic, languishing, potent, full of deep ...”

“... middle of the ‘Easter Wings’ sections of the poems often recall the early 16th-century poet John Skelton, whose staccato bursts of short rhymed satirical lines were a sort of early modern rhetorical hybrid of rap and machine-gun fire, usually directed against humanists and reformers. In these late poems Hill also draws on Ben Jonson’s poetry, in which ...”

“... to London, re-establishing a household with Holtby. Catlin joined them – and his children, John (born 1927) and Shirley (born 1930) – whenever he could. There is much to admire about Brittain’s insistence on her right to live in a new way: to have children but also a career; to marry but live where and with whom she liked. The wildfire success of ...”

“... When an ailing John Maynard Keynes travelled to the American South in March 1946, he was delighted by what he found. The ‘balmy air and bright azalean colour’ of Savannah offered a welcome reprieve from the cold and damp of London, he wrote on arriving, and the children in the streets were livelier company than the ‘irritable’ and ‘exceedingly tired’ citizens of postwar Britain ...”

“... incidents he prefers to gloss over. Ferguson had a share in the horse with the Irish businessman John Magnier, a very wealthy man whose interests (in conjunction with his associate J.P. McManus) ranged from stud farms to currency trading. What started out as a bit of fun turned deadly serious once Rock of Gibraltar began winning race after race, making him ...”

“... believe that the motive was sadism. Nor does he think, like Hitchcock’s first biographer, John Russell Taylor, that Hitchcock, far from enjoying the distress he was able to inflict on them, identified strongly with his victims. The women in the movies are, Wood proposes, ‘whatever we most fear to lose’. This ‘we’ may be just a bit too ...”

“... and fumes from coal (‘sea-coal’) burned in breweries, bakeries and glass foundries. John Evelyn’s Fumifugium, or, the Inconvenience of the Aer and Smoak of London Dissipated (1661) dismissed the idea that domestic hearths had much to do with it – probably correctly at the time.Evelyn wrote about ‘Clowds of Smoak and Sulphur, so full of ...”

“... bomb. By the time the vote came round, some had changed their minds. One who had not was the Tory John Baron, a decorated former army officer with a record of opposing British intervention in Iraq, Helmand and Libya (although not in Afghanistan in 2001). ‘Even if we believed the 70,000 figure, even if we believed they were all moderates, what the strategy ...”

“... refusing to explain or to reveal. (‘He didn’t like to impose on the audience,’ the dancer John Clifford said recently, ‘but believe me, every step meant something.’) In response to Balanchine’s statement, Kendall writes: ‘Even if Serenade has no story line, its creator went to specific lengths to give it a narrative shape. He reversed the ...”

“... in the 1920s and 1930s was primitive in its sexual psychology, never more so than in the novels of John Dickson Carr. Carr, a naturalised American, could ventriloquise British understatement almost too well, as his biographical note on the back of vintage green Penguins demonstrates, noting his ‘slight difficulty that during the blitz our house was twice ...”

“... of Paris) in April 627: ‘“The world perishes and those things that are in the world” (1 John 2:17). That, however, which has been transferred to the churches, to the shrines of saints or to the poor never perishes, and is reckoned an everlasting reminder of justice.’ Two centuries​ before the pious Theodila, the heretic Pelagius had advocated a ...”

“... Hearing the news on the Today programme this morning R. nearly cries. I met Bowie only once, at John Schlesinger’s sometime in the 1980s, and remember him as a slight, almost colourless figure, who was somehow Scots. M. calls later and recalls how someone he knew picked up Bowie when he was still David Jones. He offered to come round, bringing his guitar ...”

“... the Persians, or perhaps by a renegade Roman soldier. Others believed God had taken no chances. John Malalas, the author of a sixth-century chronicle of the world that began with the Creation, reported a dream in which a bishop transported to heaven witnessed an enthroned Christ instruct the martyr-saint Mercurius: ‘Go forth and kill the emperor ...”