“... The iterative wit of the phantom bibliography is at work in the best-known early English example: John Donne’s Catalogus librorum aulicorum incomparabilium et non vendibilium, or The Courtier’s Library of Rare Books Not for Sale. Unpublished until 1650, Donne wrote the text between about 1603 and 1611, and it proved popular in manuscript with his coterie ...”

“... as a fan of his own genre: it’s as if Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons turned out to be George Lucas.) Martin is now much more widely famous thanks to his novel cycle A Song of Ice and Fire, perhaps better known, thanks to the immense success of the HBO series, as Game of Thrones, which took its title from the first novel in the series.† Game of Thrones ...”

“... War. There were Kipling’s vivid stories of Sussex life through the ages, and then there was John Buchan’s The Path of the King, tracing ancestral virtues and vices from a Viking prince to Abraham Lincoln, taking in the depravities of Titus Oates. Even before reading these quite gripping books, we were vaguely acquainted, through schools, comics and ...”

“... serve to promote a sense of cultural coherence as a bulwark against Bolshevism. Thus it was, F.L. Lucas laconically reports, that in March 1917, ‘while Russia was tottering into revolution and America preparing for war ... at Cambridge members of the Senate met to debate the formation of an English Tripos.’ Just as world politics colour this highly ...”

“... group of film-makers: Scorsese associated with America’s ‘Movie-Brats’ (Spielberg, Coppola, Lucas), Wenders with the ‘New German Cinema’ (Fassbinder, Herzog, Schlondorff). And each has been so prolific and consistently original (Wenders with 14 films, Scorsese with 16) that he has become the dominant figure in his national cinema. Scorsese, like ...”

“... Labour MP disagree with that? What they really hated was his questioning of the private sector. John Prescott had been allowed to pledge the renationalisation of the railways at the 1996 Labour Party Conference, but after Blair’s victory the following year the subject was never raised again. Until now. When I asked him when he first realised he might ...”

“... longer merely good subjects for painters: they were up-to-date models for the Christian life. When John Bale published the interrogations of the English martyr Anne Askew in 1547, he compared her sufferings and her courage, in detail, to those of Blandina, whose heroic death was described in the ancient Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius. As ...”

“... beyond the sign to the invisible signified. As it happened, Wittenberg had in Luther’s friend Lucas Cranach not only an ardently committed Protestant, but one of the most successful painters of his generation. Cranach and his highly commercialised factory-studio poured out images which decisively shaped the official visual propaganda for the new ...”

“... Hugh Benson, Laurence Binyon, Robert Bridges, Hall Caine, G.K. Chesterton, Arthur Conan Doyle, John Galsworthy, Thomas Hardy, Maurice Hewlett, Anthony Hope, W.J. Locke, E.V. Lucas, J.W. Mackail, John Masefield, A.E.W. Mason, Gilbert Murray, Henry Newbolt, Owen ...”

“... and imitated ‘superior’ Italian humanism. In this she is following the lead of the late John Hale, whose last book, The Civilisation of Europe in the Renaissance, let the Danube School of artists, Lucas Cranach and Albrecht Altdorfer, share space with Leonardo et al. Rublack’s quest has taken her to fascinating ...”

“... and Sensibility by Edith Charlotte Brown, 1929) to Consequence, or Whatever Became of Charlotte Lucas (Elizabeth Newark, 1997) and Desire & Duty: A Sequel to Jane Austen’s ‘Pride and Prejudice’ (Ted Bader and Marilyn Bader, 1997) have appeared in print. The further adventures of Isabella Thorpe, Mrs Rushworth and even the family of Mr Collins; the ...”

“... in 1998 – iMac, iPod, iTunes, iPhone, iPad – Jobs had a few lost years. In 1983, he recruited John Sculley, president of Pepsi-Cola, as Apple’s CEO. ‘Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water,’ he asked Sculley, ‘or do you want a chance to change the world?’ Isaacson dismisses Sculley, claiming he perceived ‘in Jobs ...”

“... at the bar with Douglas Gordon while he drew me pictures of devils (I have them somewhere). Sarah Lucas and I walked the streets in search of more drink after Damien Hirst told Will Self to ‘crack a fucking smile’. I think I sang with Milli Vanilli. Life coaches will tell you that nothing interesting happens after three o’clock in the morning. They’re ...”

“... playing the Swiss Open in Gstaad, where he was defeated in straight sets by the Argentine veteran Lucas Arnold Ker. ‘It never crossed my mind that “This guy is going to be great,”’ Arnold Ker said. Three years later, in 2001, Federer hit the big time: in his second appearance in the main draw at Wimbledon he beat Pete Sampras, the world number one and ...”

“... modern jest book, which ascribed jokes and smart sayings to well-known figures such as the poet John Skelton or the fool Richard Tarleton. Jest-book-style anecdotes were often transcribed alongside more serious quotations in manuscript notebooks compiled by individual readers. So in 1601, the lawyer John Manningham ...”