“... The Archers on Radio 4, so I’m out of touch. I read in the papers that Phil Archer, or at least Norman Painting, who played him, died recently, but is Jill still around? Where’s Shula? What’s with Eddie Grundy? Old Walter Gabriel must be long gone, but what happened to his scapegrace son, Nelson? Are the village shop and post office still open, or does ...”

“... exceptional remarks: gloom was everywhere. At the beginning of the 1960s, Jane Jacobs and Lewis Mumford, America’s most famous writers on urban issues, sensed a crisis on the horizon, but they didn’t foresee just how badly things would turn out. Nor did Robert Moses, who had been in charge of city planning since the 1920s, and whose mammoth ...”

“... a mansion, designed by Robert Adam, and a park which remain a high point of British design. Norman Poser is not Mansfield’s first biographer, but he is arguably the best so far. The first, John Holliday, wrote his not always reliable memoir shortly after Mansfield’s death. Then came Lord Campbell, himself a chief justice, whose biographies of his ...”

“... but more instructive. English law, which recognised and enforced slavery until well after the Norman Conquest, no longer did by the 16th century, when a lucrative slave trade developed between West Africa and the American and Caribbean colonies. The courts of England, however, gave their sanction to slave trading during the 17th century, in part by ...”

“... of symbolism in Medieval literature is refreshing. Nevertheless, the book’s tone (very C.S. Lewis) does now seem rather old-fashioned and bellelettrist and one’s understanding of Chrétien de Troyes is not increased by the parallels that Vinaver draws between him and John Steinbeck; nor does the long section on Flaubert serve to throw much light on ...”

“... anxiety. These are works characterised above all by a spirit of hatred which, according to C.S. Lewis in his Reflections on the Psalms (1961), ‘strikes us in the face … like the heat from a furnace mouth’. Psalm 1 in the Authorised Version warns that ‘the way of the ungodly shall perish,’ and from then on fury and malediction alternate with ...”

“... in the continuing vitality of literature, including Yeats, Lawrence, Ford Madox Ford, Wyndham Lewis and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. The writers, clustered in clubs or ‘gangs’, wanted to redraw the cultural map. The Victorians were moribund, their prosody stalled at the level of Felicia Hemans’s ‘Casabianca’, a paean to obedience that filled the ...”

“... as ‘apprentices’. Dawkins Pennant put some of this money into building Penrhyn Castle as a neo-Norman fantasia, but though a large sum at the time, it paled in comparison to the riches he and his forebears had accumulated during their decades of slave ownership. His fortune at his death in 1840 was an estimated £600,000. By the end of the 19th ...”

“... Broadway theatre, not to see a play but to enjoy what was meant to be a thrilling contest between Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal. The place was packed; except for those sponsored by some publisher, the audience had bought very expensive tickets, and they displayed a keenness more appropriate to a prizefight. Indeed a prizefight was what they expected, Mailer ...”

“... world and the raging, outrageous heroes of a pitiless antinomian God. Johannes Baader, Jerry Lee Lewis, Gabriel Pomerand, Colin Donellan, Michel Mourre, John of Leyden, Sid Vicious, Poly Styrene: these and many others are the ragged doomsters of Marcus’s secret history. To track their explosive and erratic careers he uses whatever maps he can find: the ...”

“... of nurture for the developing poet. Particularly acute is his demonstration of the importance of Lewis Spence to MacDiarmid. Bold argues convincingly that it was Spence’s attitude to nationalism and to the Scots language that encouraged Grieve to reverse his earlier condemnation of the attempt to write in that medium, and so stimulated the first Scots ...”

“... to be exposed early to Greek or Latin, or even to their own language as it existed before the Norman Conquest, tend to find the notion of grammatical case baffling despite the survival in English of a genitive case (renamed possessive) and the distinction between subject and object pronouns in the first and third persons. Evidently, the alleged Irish ...”

“... In Europe’s Inner Demons, Norman Cohn described the medieval witch craze as a ‘supreme example of a massive killing of innocent people by a bureaucracy acting in accordance with beliefs which, unknown or rejected in earlier centuries, had come to be taken for granted, as self-evident truths’. Of course popular beliefs had to fall into line with the bureaucracy’s position, and Cohn provides plenty of examples to show that they did: rural and small-town societies were rich in resentments, ancestral curses and fears of the unknown ...”

“... but despite the rollcall of topics Murray reminded him that they had discussed – ‘Street, Norman Shaw, a volume of topography articles, an Approach to Victorian Architecture, the next volume of memoirs’ – none was forthcoming. ‘William Hickey’ in the Daily Express foresaw Betjeman’s likely role as poet laureate and commissioned him to write ...”

“... beautiful with honeysuckle, clematis and lupins. The church is particularly interesting. A Saxon-Norman central tower has become a west tower with the disappearance of the original nave. Now a small Norman nave runs east of the tower on the site of the first chancel. There is a fine fresco above the chancel arch – a ...”