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“... his responses – he never forgot how Junius Booth, the father of Lincoln’s murderer, had played Richard III – Whitman also had a shrewd eye for the incongruous. Even his moving and heroic poem on Lincoln’s death suggests an absurdity inseparable from the face of heroism. And it was in that direction that Stephen Crane’s odd sleepwalker’s gift was to ...”

“... lessons of Clarke, who had been found guilty of heresy, and to the reasoning of dissenters like Richard Baxter and Isaac Watts. For anyone who wishes to praise Johnson’s moral stature, the evasion is troublesome. Clergymen constantly taught that the morality practised by the ancients lacked the virtues inspired by Christianity. In one of his best ...”

“... It employed no reporters – news items were prepared from Reuter’s agency copy – until Richard Dimbleby, a reporter on Southampton’s evening newspaper, applied for a job with a bold letter suggesting that some members of the news staff might be called ‘BBC reporters or BBC correspondents’ and ‘held in readiness, just as are the evening ...”

“... looked for in the contribution of Virgil, Ovid and other Latin authors to the work of Marlowe, Greene and the rest. Pollard shows that Greek was also part of their formation. Shakespeare’s early collaborator George Peele, for instance, translated Iphigenia in Aulis and explored the grief and rage of Hecuba in his narrative poem A Tale of ...”

“... V, when it is said of the dying Falstaff that ‘his Nose was as sharpe as a Pen, and a Table of greene fields’. Theobald’s emendation is widely though by no means universally accepted, and occurs in the Oxford modern version as ‘a babbled’, in the ‘original’ as ‘a babeld’ – again an attempt to reproduce the manuscript reading a compositor ...”

“... novel about a game of bluff and counter-bluff between British and East German intelligence. Graham Greene helped it on its way by calling it ‘the best spy story I have ever read’. It took the genre into what the paranoid CIA spymaster James Jesus Angleton, citing T.S. Eliot, called ‘a wilderness of mirrors’, and topped bestseller lists in Britain and ...”

“... slow swing replaced by a nocturne. The station cut in again with a learned authority, ‘Professor Richard Pierson, famous astronomer’, direct from the Princeton observatory to explain the discharge and point out that Mars could not support intelligent life. Pierson, however, confessed that he could not explain the regularity of the emissions. More ...”

“... nation. Documentation of these murky activities is predictably scarce, but we have Graham Greene’s fictional account, The Quiet American, originally published in 1955, the insights in which still bite. Greene’s narrator, Thomas Fowler, a cynical British journalist who smokes opium, keeps a teenage Vietnamese ...”

“... Waiting in the wings is a book by him about Ursula, entitled Style, which, according to Graham Greene, who was sent the manuscript, might be edited for publication. There may be a cult in the making – and one could imagine a film by Antonioni, whose scriptwriter, Mark Peploe, was intrigued by J. Behrens in his last days. Ursula’s life resembles John ...”

“... 1965].TP: I went to see Burroughs. The two dead people I got to show this book to: one was Richard Hamilton who died this week; the other was William Burroughs was died earlier on. William Burroughs was very generous in a terrifying kind of way. He said it’s okay, and why wasn’t it science fiction? I had a very tough day with him. Very ...”

“... chapter to the ways in which the plays of the period – such as the anonymous comedy George a Greene, the Pinner of Wakefield (c.1590), Antony Munday’s two-part Downfall and Death of Robert Earl of Huntingdon (1598) and Jonson’s unfinished Sad Shepherd – remember or re-enact the paradigmatic story of Robin Hood. In George Peele’s Edward I, the ...”

“... A sentimental glow surrounds the Emancipation Proclamation, but in fact, as the historian Richard Hofstadter once said, it possessed all the ‘moral grandeur of a bill of lading’. It contained no criticism of slavery and did not free all slaves; the legal status of at least 800,000 slaves was not affected. The proclamation did not free those held ...”

“... It is in their judgments that you will first find the tests of lawful decision-making which Lord Greene later summarised in the much-cited Wednesbury case, a decision which introduced no new doctrine of law and of which the outcome (upholding a highly questionable ban on children going to the cinema on Sundays) exemplifies the state of torpor into which ...”

“... Loach and Garnett were ready to move on from the BBC, where the liberal regime overseen by Hugh Greene was coming to an end. Loach had already made one thoroughly unsatisfactory venture into feature film with Poor Cow (1967), co-starring Carol White and Terence Stamp, the latter fresh from John Schlesinger’s grandiose Far from the Madding Crowd. He and ...”

“... but also to educate them in new musical trends, and major works by Stravinsky, Schoenberg and Richard Strauss were premiered at the Proms before the First World War. But in the beginning, Wood’s programmes were much less demanding, often consisting of many short items, so as not to bore the audience. This was especially true of the early final ...”