“... jumped straight on a train to Nashville, there to meet with her friends-and-collaborators-to-be. John Crowe Ransom, then a key member of the Fugitive group, tells the story of what happened next. Undoubtedly we were rather absurd in the way we received Laura at Nashville – prim, formidable and stiff. What she came for was human companionship of the most ...”

“... of myself as a mental self, my feeling is that I am continually new. In his autobiography, John Updike writes: ‘I have the persistent sensation, in my life ... that I am just beginning.’ This seems exactly right. The experience of the ‘I’ as in some sense new each time is (I suggest) fundamental and universally available, although it is ...”

“... have something of the malign energy one later finds in the children of Lord of the Flies or John Dollar. Woolley is right, and indeed a bit cautious, when he says that ‘Sheridan distorts Moryson’s account in some details.’ When Swift came to write A Modest Proposal less than year after Sheridan’s paper appeared, he went beyond Sheridan and ...”

“... dark grey suits (no pinstripes), blue plastic helmets, heavy-duty wellies and – apart from John Prescott – full zip millennial grins. Showcased by a long-focus lens that tactfully blurs the background of industrial dereliction. Britain is Working. Handson management. Optimism. Good humour. That stuff. A cross between a hobbled moon walk and Neil ...”

“... for questions. The tale of Hylas, for instance, is one of the better-known episodes, thanks to John William Waterhouse’s painting with its loved-up, spaced-out nymphs. Casually, Apollonius drops a bombshell: Hercules had adopted the boy, he says, after killing his father. He alludes to some dispute over an ox, but has no time to explain: ‘these tales ...”

“... the immediate aftermath of Conceptual Art, in the late Sixties and on into the Seventies, when John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Victor Burgin, Les Levine and others used billboards for work which blended fine art with political propaganda. By dethroning painting, Conceptual Art opened the gates to a range of other media, not simply text and installation, but also ...”

“... they could not have failed to be true. Undeserved suffering does not merely happen to be bad.When John Leslie defends the Axiarchic View, he appeals to this kind of non-logical necessity. Not only does value rule reality, Leslie suggests, it could not have failed to rule. But this suggestion is hard to believe. While it is inconceivable that undeserved ...”

“... Mack Smith writes. (One should not forget, however, that other great European liberals, including John Stuart Mill, had profound misgivings about pure democratic government.) It was the liberal leader Giovanni Giolitti who tried gradually to open up politics to wider circles of the population in the last years of the 19th century and the first two decades of ...”

“... vetted by MI5 (this didn’t end until the 1990s), its embrace of commercial structures under John Birt, director-general in the 1990s, and the shadier aspects of its foreign language broadcasting. Arguments about the relationship between the BBC and politics usually concentrate on its journalistic output, ignoring its cultural programming, but then the ...”

“... in part to buy time while composing the next line. (As it happens, Parry corresponded with John and Alan Lomax, who travelled around the American South recording folk musicians.) ‘The singer of tales,’ Parry later wrote, ‘has no pen and ink to let him slowly work out a novel way of recounting novel actions, but must make up his tale without ...”

“... like Sackville-West but, not yet 21, needed parental permission. Her father, the shipping magnate John Ellerman, refused. He didn’t want his daughter, whom he called Dolly, to be anything other than frills and curls. Bryher – who renamed herself after one of the Scilly Isles when she was in her mid-twenties, who felt like a boy trapped in the wrong body ...”

“... were not a product of the American distraction factories, but originated in Manchester in 1889. John Tiller, cotton trader by day and musical impresario by night, had noticed that the effect of chorus dancers was marred by lack of discipline and, we must suppose, solved the problem by applying proto-Taylorian Mancunian production techniques. Everyone from ...”

“... him with Basil Fawlty. Except that the dying Dennis Potter went further, maybe, when he called John Birt, the BBC’s then director-general, ‘a croak-voiced Dalek’ in 1993. Much expectation surrounded Doctor Who’s return last year, into an industry that has changed vastly since he went away. Mark Thompson, the BBC’s current director-general, sees ...”

“... seedy urban living to replace the laboured machinery of detection. The kind of murder mystery that John Peacock unravels in Attard in Retirement could in principle have been offered at any time since radio began – though Peacock, a workmanlike writer, scatters Smileyesque detail about, presumably to reassure the listener that he has not really been wasting ...”

“... of itself,’ he says in his Study of Thomas Hardy, a sentiment which might have been uttered by John Stuart Mill himself. But what Lawrence meant by ‘self’ was not to be confused with the ‘cheap egotism’ of the ‘self-conscious little ego’ described by modern individualism. ‘I know that life, and life only, is the clue to the ...”