“... start. No Biblical author is more obviously in control of the conventions he uses than St Paul, and the single essay on the Pauline Epistles, by Michael Goulder, does full justice to the Apostle’s originality, and his ability to outsmart his opponents by mobilising the rhetorical devices of his day. With the Gospels, the interplay of individual ...”

“... prejudice apparent as late as Carey’s The Intellectuals and the Masses, but Oxfordians like C.S. Lewis assailed modernism from a conservative standpoint and Carey does it from a populist one. Modernism was by far the most significant movement of the period with which the book deals: it changed the face of literary culture and shook art to its ...”

“... and enters a purgatory reminiscent of the no-man’s-land inhabited by deserter-troglodytes in Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory. Audrey succumbs to encephalitis lethargica, the ‘sleepy sickness’ that swept Europe after the First World War. Constantin Von Economo, who first described the condition, called its most extreme sufferers ...”

“... So characteristic of Paul Muldoon’s poetry as to be almost a hallmark is the moment, unnerving and exciting in about equal measures, when his speaker is suddenly revealed to himself as someone else. The whole world expands and changes in ‘Cass and Me’ when, as a boy, he climbs on the older Cass’s shoulders, and they lean out                across the yard As a giant would across the world ...”

“... imagine what fun Bunny had’ – as if his job stopped at sourcing the raw material for a story.Paul Thomas Anderson therefore had room to experiment when he adapted the novel for the screen as There Will Be Blood (2007). His protagonist, Daniel Plainview (the role for which Daniel Day-Lewis won his second Oscar), is a ...”

“... painted, cooked, travelled and made love in something like contentment. She was at the Slade with Paul Nash (who gave her his braces, taking them off on top of a bus), and through him or through Nevinson she might have become an illustrator, as they were, for the Poetry Bookshop. She could have learned etching from Sickert, always generous to beginners, or ...”

“... book wants to serve to mitigate ‘racial oppression in the present’.In 1995, the historian Earl Lewis wrote that African American history needed to be situated in a history of ‘overlapping diasporas’, and Otele bears this in mind throughout her work. She begins with the presence in Africa of the Roman Empire, and progresses chronologically, emphasising ...”

“... Kinetoscope in 1895 by combining camera and projector in their Cinématographe. In Britain Robert Paul produced his own camera and projector when Edison refused to supply him with films. Paul also patented a design for a time machine based on H.G. Wells’s short story, in which a series of moving platforms would ...”

“... suggested nonetheless that the process had gone too far, and that even giants like Empson and C.S. Lewis could be guilty in this way of serious distortions of a text: he instanced a bravura passage in The Allegory of Love on Spenser’s ‘Bower of Bliss’, in which Lewis, with his characteristic puritanical ...”

“... or ‘beautiful new hat’ would win his interest. But it was mainly her literary friendship with Paul Bourget, and her beginnings as an author, with The Greater Inclination (1899) and The Valley of Decision (1902), that achieved this aim. ‘The explanation, of course, was that in that interval I had found myself’: Edith Wharton’s first ...”

“... who have made names for themselves and written copiously while still in their late twenties are Paul Watkins, Paul Sayer and Louis de Bernières. Watkins had his first novel (Night over Day over Night) nominated for the Booker, and won the Encore Prize with his second. Sayer won the Constable Trophy for fiction and the ...”

“... is time?’ St Augustine wondered. ‘Provided that no one asks me, I know.’ Gillian Adler and Paul Strohm explore the many answers proposed by writers, artists and visionaries in the Middle Ages. ‘Medieval people’, they write, were ‘more keenly aware of simultaneous and contending temporalities than we are, and more skilled at entertaining a wider ...”

“... especially if we form the habit of labelling all non-Lutheran Protestantism Calvinist. Gillian Lewis, in a fine essay on Geneva, shows how short-lived were the claims of that declining and divided city to a theological and administrative sovereignty which in any case Calvin never wanted for it. Alastair Duke on the Netherlands, Henry Cohn on ...”

“... by E.C. Bentley, the inventor of the form: ‘He said, “if anyone calls/Say I’m designing St Paul’s’ (a building which he completed in 1710). Hill’s poem lives locally in these small, self-delighting verbal graces that can have the air of deft contrivance or happy accident, while its more momentous and even ominous compulsions work themselves out ...”

“... still in its early stages, Newman and three others formed a band called Wire. The bassist, Graham Lewis, ‘a fashion graduate doing freelance design for London boutiques’, tells Reynolds they chose the name for its ‘graphic quality’. At first, such signs of ambition beyond the usual rock moves – Wire also liked to stand still onstage, like mannequins ...”