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“... the episodes often look like music videos, an effect enhanced by guest appearances from Phil Collins, Willie Nelson, Little Richard, Miles Davis and many others. But the other, complementary theory of the series’ origin names a news story about vice cops using repossessed goods as a glossy cover for their assumed criminal characters. This is why Don ...”

“... in 1991; Lamar Cecil needed two books to capture the life, the second published in 1996. Now comes John Röhl, with the first of three projected volumes. Wilhelm himself, to whom modesty was always a mysterious idea, would doubtless have been pleased by the thought of a thousand-page doorstopper devoted to his youth. It is unlikely that he would have enjoyed ...”

“... Land League were presented as non-constitutional headaches for O’Connell and Parnell. Michael Collins was a Treaty negotiator rather than a warlord. Outside in the world there were car bombs and hunger strikes, done in the name of our nation, in the name of history. Inside we were cleansing history, concentrating on those aspects of our past which would ...”

“... of George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass; various reflections on the fortieth anniversary of John Lennon’s death; a trailer for Peter Jackson’s new Beatles documentary, Get Back; a new documentary about Mark David Chapman; an article trailed as ‘the inside story of how Bowie met John Lennon’; a lockdown viewing ...”

“... shared faith broken, a Christian community irreparably divided. This was how the London annalist John Stow, who lived through the entire process, understood it, with much nostalgic mourning for all those seasonal rituals and festivals and the social reconciliation they symbolised, a slightly more sophisticated version of the common saying that it was a merry ...”

“... way things are all manner of discontinuous instrumentalities, and one of these is the aphorism. So John Gross’s Oxford Book of Aphorisms might, if properly used, be less a book to nod over than a neo-philosophical catena, an instance of the edifying that ousts the epistemological. As a matter of fact, it contains some strong anti-systematic ...”

“... Bai’s historically rich French Concession, set in 1930s Shanghai, will be published by Harper Collins next year, and is a better bet than Mai Jia’s potboiler. Perry Link wrote a balanced review – marginally favourable – of Decoded in the New York Times. This was difficult for Mai Jia, since Link has been banned from entering mainland China because ...”

“... piece called Appalachian Spring in collaboration with Aaron Copland and Isamu Noguchi. In 1945, John Cage and Merce Cunningham would marry their exploratory sensibilities. All these artists were struggling, in the words of Lincoln Kirstein, who co-founded the New York City Ballet, ‘to impose a native meaning on a recalcitrant alien dance ...”

“... Dynasty range was opened at Blooming-dale’s, 26,000 women stormed the New York store. The actor John Forsythe, who plays the Creon-like Blake Carrington, was beaten over the head at Atlanta airport by a woman who abused him for daring to treat his lovely wife so badly. More disturbing still is the way real life has been vacuumed into the fantasy. In Dynasty ...”

“... poets discussed by Bridget Keegan – Ann Yearsley, Mary Robinson, Henry Headley and later John Clare – were all of one mind about this. Chatterton, they thought, had died by his own hand in poverty and despair, neglected by the metropolitan world. Michael Suarez’s account here shows that Chatterton’s relations with the book trade after he ...”

“... fell away in the 20th. In 1991, the Sumo wrestler Takanofuji was weighed at 21 st 6 lbs. In 1924 John Rodney Bastard weighed 2 st 9 lbs; ten years later he was 8 st 10 lbs. Trust in Berry Bros counted for a lot: that a hundredweight of coffee really was a hundredweight has always been everything; that Byron really did weigh 11 st 5 lbs; that the contents of ...”

“... principles were more influential than his practice. Although his short memoir of his friend John Sterling is counted as a minor classic of biography, his much more elaborate life of Cromwell, not to say his interminable History of Frederick the Great, has never been shortlisted among the world’s greatest examples of the art. But Carlyle possessed one ...”

“... of bawdy talk.Informed by black feminist thinkers such as Charlotte Pierce-Baker, Patricia Hill Collins, Sowande’ Mustakeem and Kimberlé Crenshaw, as well as by feminist scholarship more broadly, Harris examines the susceptibility of particular individuals to sexual violence in late medieval society. Through close readings of pastourelles, song ...”

“... of the law of treason by Eyre (which has recently attracted renewed ironical attention from John Barrell) which was hurled into print on the very eve of the notorious Treason Trials of 1794. The second piece is the ‘Considerations’ on the Two Acts (1795), in which Godwin seemed to come forward (anonymously) to condone legislation against popular ...”

“... that Bush’s delivery is really an impersonation of Ronald Reagan impersonating James Stewart and John Wayne, but I think that elevates him too much: his mentality is clouded with lesser subtleties, occluded with hungers of a more brutal, mercenary, low-budget kind. He has the effective salesman’s knowledge of how to play with people’s sense of what is ...”