“... the classical view from above comes near the end of the poem, after the fall, when the archangel Michael shows Adam a series of mostly grim prophetic visions of what lies in store for his descendants. In Milton’s brief epic Paradise Regained Satan shows Jesus the kingdoms of the world as a series of visions from above. Here, unusually, the guide is ...”

“... years’.The government was determined to extract an apology from the men. The attorney general, Michael Havers, was sent to Walton to persuade them. Havers went from cell to cell, trying to talk to each man separately, promising early release. He then addressed them in the prison chapel. All they had to do was say sorry. If they did, they could leave that ...”

“... very centre of its inside; what seemed circumstantial has been redefined as constitutive.’ As Robert Scholes put it, we must ‘make the object of study the whole intertextual system of relations that connects one text to others ... the matrix or master code that the literary text both depends upon and modifies’. That is, he continues, ‘in order to ...”

“... for the Isle of Dogs, that unlucky swamp, were shredded for the construction of a shelf of towers. Michael Heseltine, a wild-haired, mad-eyed visionary (Klaus Kinski to Margaret Thatcher’s Werner Herzog), pushed Docklands across the Thames to the East Greenwich Peninsula, Bugsby’s Marshes. The obsessive, neurotic and delusional Millennium Dome concept was ...”

“... could be married and a film born.The back office deity of that era was the seven-times-married Robert Evans, who ran production at Paramount for a decade from 1966, when the studio made The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, Chinatown and Rosemary’s Baby. The ghost of Evans haunts Pandora’s Box, which covers the time some perhaps premature ...”

“... tender. ‘God bless you, my dear son. I pray for you constantly,’ he writes to his first-born, Michael, in 1941. ‘My dearest,’ he addresses his younger son, Christopher, in 1944.What else can we learn from Tolkien’s letters? Well, he loved trees and the English countryside, and hated cars and machinery. He hated France and the French, although he did ...”

“... extricate place from nation’, she is gratified to find herself standing on the spot where Robert Emmet was hanged in 1803. The psychological basis of her selective vision of Irishness could not be more plainly set forth. Once Boland was settled in Dublin, reading filled in her sense of an Ireland which she did not ‘possess’. But in her ...”

“... politics we got the PUP and the UDP. They have been joined by the barrister-turned-politician, Robert McCartney who, along with Conor Cruise O’Brien, founded the UKUP (that rogue ‘K’ is for ‘Kingdom’), to oppose further UUP sell-outs and the mayhem of a united Ireland. In last month’s Assembly elections there were also candidates who variously ...”

“... a back seat. The first lengthy testimony in the book comes from two men on that committee, Robert Vázquez-Pacheco and Moisés Agosto-Rosario, and shows how much autonomy could exist within the organisation. Vázquez-Pacheco, a Black Puerto Rican born in New York City, made the transition from audience member at meetings to visibility in the simplest ...”

“... and out. The unions’ hold over the British workplace from the 1940s to the 1970s, the historian Robert Taylor concluded in 1994, was ‘always more illusory and less substantial than their many enemies liked to suggest’. The same goes for union militancy in general. The graph of working days lost annually in Britain to strikes and other labour disputes is ...”

“... Rocks & Mountains’, found in a manuscript collection of settings by the Jacobean lutenist Robert Johnson (who is not to be confused with the Tudor church musician of that name, or indeed with the great Delta blues singer of the 1930s). Johnson is known to have composed music for King’s Men productions, and his beautiful settings of Ariel’s songs ...”

“... the entire country. Based on research completed in August 1994 in 41 of the 145 Rwandan communes, Robert Gersony, a UNHCR consultant, estimated that ‘between 25,000 and 40,000 persons’ were killed during the first 100 days of RPF rule. The Gersony report – in fact just briefing notes – was leaked to the press. Under intense pressure from Kigali and ...”

“... enjoins everyone to refrain from dogmatism. Though unable to refrain from a hefty side-swipe at Robert Kagan’s Martians, Soros generally abides by his own rules. Thus a liberal concept of human nature is saved, albeit by a curious exaltation of indeterminacy. In his introduction, Todd says that the most disturbing thing about the present situation is ...”

“... at the barber’s) about The Way to the Stars with the young Jean Simmons, and the making of Michael Powell’s A Canterbury Tale, and the first Royal Command Performance, another Powell film, A Matter of Life and Death.Suburban cinemas were often pretty comfortless places. While the entrance could be quite imposing, with the box-office generally at the ...”

“... island’s seigneur. The Barclays did pay a treizième of £179,000 to the seigneur at the time, Michael Beaumont, but it wasn’t long before they challenged it by issuing Beaumont with a summons claiming that Brecqhou didn’t fall under Sark’s jurisdiction. (They withdrew from the proceedings in 2000.)The Barclays weren’t afraid of antagonising their ...”