“... that the Buddha was a Negro. Various British residents in India, including the great Sir William Jones, discoverer of the Indo-European language roots, echoed this: the Buddha had the nose and lips and the ‘crisp and woolly’ hair of Africans. (Others thought that the curls on the Buddha’s head were snails.) Athanasius Kircher, whose name is always ...”

“... for him as a young director. But Scorsese and his fellow enthusiasts Francis Ford Coppola and Brian De Palma could only watch the movies in ‘degraded versions, bad copies’. It wasn’t until 1983, forty years after its release, that a restored version of Powell and Pressburger’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp was finally screened. The original ...”

“... Mann’s Manhunter (1988), best known as a sort of prequel to The Silence of the Lambs, with Brian Cox doing a turn as Hannibal Lecter. The serial killer in the film is an Obsessive Avenger with a vengeance, murdering entire families of strangers carefully selected on the basis of the perfection of their normality. His psychology is obliquely explored in ...”

“... and the Home Guard use for practice. Empathy and interest are narrowly focused. A boy called Brian ‘had two rods that went down from his boot to an iron ring, and we all wanted to have one ourselves because it stopped him being bullied. If anyone tried he crunched their feet so they couldn’t walk.’ Events that happen at a distance can’t really be ...”

“... Interests for April 1994 shows the former whip and foreign office minister Tristan Garel-Jones to be an adviser to British Gas, the Union Bank of Switzerland and the civil engineering group Biwater International. David Mellor has amassed 12 paid consultancies since resigning from office, including Racal Tacticom, Ernst and Young, Short ...”

“... Georgia had just tipped 1400 votes in favour of Joe Biden. If Georgia’s arch-villain governor, Brian Kemp, had still been in charge of our state elections as he was in 2016, he would have personally eaten those 1400 votes and died at the vet’s of an obstructed bowel, rather than let that happen. But the unthinkable had come to pass: Georgia had gone ...”

“... Schwarz (Fricka) and Heinz Zednik (Loge). Here, and throughout the cycle, the lighting was superb. Brian Large’s direction of the filming was sensitive, and provided a salutary contrast with the horrors of BBC Television’s Kata Kabanova. But although Wagner’s exploration of the corrupting, dehumanising effects of power naturally includes an indictment of ...”

“... of many a lesser figure. In what might be called the peripheral stakes Dylan Thomas and even David Jones have had more attention in some quarters – in the case of Dylan Thomas, with a wild publicity which has had little enough to do with his work. MacDiarmid, it is true, has had a share of irrelevant – and sometimes damaging – publicity, mainly ...”

“... as strong for disliking the editors of the Times Literary Supplement (successively Alan Pryce-Jones, Arthur Crook and John Gross) and indeed held the whole London literary world in contempt as a self-serving clique. He became a lecturer in 1936, already over forty, and a full lecturer at 52. MacKillop deals with this scandalously slow ascent in great ...”

“... Beardsley told Smithers that the Peacock should ‘untiringly and unflinchingly attack the Burne-Jones and Morrisian medieval business’. Beardsley was committed to ‘usurpation’: he was determined to use the work of his elders and betters in his own manner, cleverly transporting it into a new and original style of his own – to outdo Morris at being ...”

“... tradesmen, children who want it all and nannies who are little better than extortionists in Peter Jones aprons. Labour, Mandelson said just before his fall, was ‘intensely relaxed about people becoming filthy rich’. When the Guardian story broke and Mandelson thought he was still managing the news, he was confident it would be sufficient to say that ...”

“... on the use of the word hoor with a range of examples from the writings of Patrick Kavanagh, Brian Friel, Tim Pat Coogan, Oliver St John Gogarty, Neil Jordan and Hugh Leonard. It’s a method that seems to be at once academically sound and, for those committed to a long weekend in England and Wales carrying only one bag and one book, perfect for a bit of ...”

“... for himself. He knew and admired Hastings, and was a friend of the great orientalist Sir William Jones, scholar of Persian and Sanskrit, and, as Mr Jones, a member of the Club, present at Boswell’s election. When Johnson first wrote to Hastings on 30 March 1774, recommending to him the future Sir Robert Chambers, one of ...”

“... To make money, Elton began to work as a session musician, singing backing vocals for Tom Jones and playing piano with the Hollies. He also worked for a label called Marble Arch which knocked out versions of chart hits and sold the albums cheap in supermarkets. This, Elton points out, might sound sad, but it was in fact ‘screamingly, howlingly ...”

“... there may continue to be minor alarums, such as the recent spat over the entry for Patrick O’Brian). Nonetheless, a not dissimilar kind of sleep-disturbing responsibility fell on its editor, and the project was fortunate to find the ideal man for the job in the Oxford historian Colin Matthew, who had demonstrated his capacity for the task in his ...”