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“... gruelling routines had to be rolled around the palate and the tongue many a time before Clive James suddenly exclaimed: “A Shropshire Cunt by A.E. Sockprong”.’ I have a Y chromosome, so I can just about see that this is funny. But I can’t imagine that it was enough, as Hitchens suggests, ‘to make the long interludes of puerility ...”

“... confesses to being in love with his sheep, Daisy: ‘It was the greatest lay I ever had!’ In Edward Albee’s The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? (2000), the same premise plays out as family tragedy. The disclosure of the father’s goat-love – ‘a love of an … (dogmatic) un-i-mag-in-able kind’ – prompts both marital crisis and a frantic burst of ...”

“... characterised Césaire’s own view of négritude, which he always saw as ‘part of the left’. Edward Said found in it a ‘way beyond nativism’, because it showed that the intense experience of identity can coexist with a determination not to ‘give in to the rigidity and interdictions of self-imposed limitations that come with race, moment, or ...”

“... to become a barrister but spent most of his time with literary friends, including the critic Edward Dowden and the poet John Todhunter. John and Susan named their first child William Butler Yeats. Soon afterwards they had a daughter, Lily. As a law student, John Butler Yeats had begun drawing – and his talent at it, as well as the influence of his ...”

“... Rex Ingram’s The Magician (1926), drawn from a Maugham novel, mysteriously incorporated into the James Whale Frankenstein and subsequently acquiring the generic name of Igor – by his grudging response to one of the few occasions when a disability materialises as an aspect of the hero. Howard Breslin’s short story ‘Bad Day at Honda’ has an explicitly ...”

“... site of the Battle of Gettysburg is the first such enterprise in modern history. The precedent, as Edward Everitt, the Harvard president and professor of classics who was the main speaker at its dedication, pointed out, was the ‘immortal field’ at Marathon, which we read about in Herodotus. Between the ancient Greeks and modern times we seem to have been ...”

“... Orchestra (1939) might slot seamlessly into a concert programme of English string pieces like Edward Elgar’s Introduction and Allegro for Strings and Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending, but by the time of his third opera, The Knot Garden, first performed in 1970, Tippett was using an electric guitar, keyboard and drum kit to pump the liberating ...”

“... annual showpiece. Inside the Brighton Centre, a hulking, rather worn building which was opened by James Callaghan in September 1977, shortly before the close working relationship between unions and Labour governments collapsed, seemingly for good, the conference hall was quiet and two-thirds full. The upstairs galleries had been curtained off, and an audience ...”

“... expected to provide some co-ordinates. Yet even among modern masters there is little consistency. James died in his early seventies, Musil in his early sixties: Leon Edel and Karl Corino awarded them each two thousand pages. Kafka, who barely reached the age of forty, yielded only five hundred fewer from Reiner Stach. Proust, expiring at 51, got just under a ...”

“... or at least in Protestant accounts. Greater notice is taken of the plaudits of the chronicler Edward Hall and of the (qualified) gratitude of the martyrologist John Foxe. Yet there has been an alternative tradition in Henrician historiography, and not only on the Catholic side. Beside Shakespeare’s tribute to Henry stands Sir Walter Ralegh’s ...”

“... aspirations. In Egypt in the same year as Amritsar, disorder was put down by General Sir Edward Bulfin with ‘such a display of force as would bring conviction that conflict with the Government was hopeless’. Floggings, shootings, hangings and the burning of houses and livestock, as a result of which 1500 people died, achieved the desired ...”

“... In Oxford, his early poems were noticed. William Wootten, in The Alvarez Generation (2015), quotes Edward Lucie-Smith: ‘We Oxford poets had an inferiority complex about our Cambridge contemporaries. The chief cause was Thom Gunn. Though his first collection, Fighting Terms, did not appear until 1954, the poems Gunn was publishing in magazines were already ...”

“... invalid dressed in a black dress with a white ruff. It was painted – from memory – by Alfred Edward Chalon, RA (1781-1860), and when it came into the College’s possession, it was said to be ‘very little like’ her. Chalon was widely patronised by the aristocracy, and later received the title of ‘Portrait-painter in water-colours to Her ...”

“... fate. The centralisation is one of the principal things that attracts freebooting tycoons like Sir James Dyson and Sir Jim Ratcliffe, along with the press barons, to the Brexit cause. As Rupert Murdoch, always more candid than his fellows, once remarked, the trouble with the EU was that you never knew who to call.All of Oborne’s books have been published in ...”

“... and stagnant canals was left far behind for Help!, which transplanted the Beatles into a witless James Bond parody that had little to do with anything in their lives. David Melbye, in his contribution to The Beatles in Context, argues persuasively that we too often have a ‘tendency to see before we listen’, and that ‘what impelled (and impels) the ...”