“... Eliot also worked phrases from other passages cited in his essay into other poems, notably Ash Wednesday. There was more to all this than shared churchmanship. In a celebrated comparison between Andrewes and John Donne, Eliot maintained that Andrewes was a ‘medieval’ rather than a ‘modern’ writer. He valued ...”

“... the party’s co-operation agreement with the Scottish Greens. Yousaf and his replacement, John Swinney, sullied their reputations by defending the former health secretary Michael Matheson, who misled Holyrood’s presiding officer over £11,000 of roaming charges racked up on his iPad. The SNP’s centralising tendencies, lack of transparency and ...”

“... however, Young thought that the Early Victorian period had fallen into contempt, and by 1917 John Morley’s Recollections confessed that ‘critics today are wont to speak contemptuously of the mid-Victorian age.’ Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians was published in May the following year – a revenge, at least in part, on the Victorian values ...”

“... name of a fictional spy? Why couldn’t Fleming have used another pair of common monosyllables – John Clark, say? Bond is a solid, blue-chip, faith-giving kind of a name. Who wouldn’t prefer a government Bond under their mattress (we’re talking AAA British) to a petty clerk? Is your word your clerk? I don’t think so. Bond. It’s in the name. More than ...”

“... sources and give them life within her fiction is quite exceptional. The Protestant martyrologist John Foxe relates in sketchy detail, with much acknowledgment that his sources are imperfect, the burning of the Lollard Joan Boughton at Smithfield in 1494. ‘The night following that she was burnt,’ Foxe says, ‘the most part of her ashes were had away of ...”

“... its connotations of Scouts munching marshmallows, glints off the gold teeth of corpses reduced to ash. Seidel, despite all his rage, is just one more rat in a cage. A very, very rich rat, it’s true, whose cages include the finest hotels and restaurants: ‘I am a result of the concierge at the Carlyle.’ The son of a St Louis coal magnate, he has never had ...”

“... about what caused the earlier extinctions have varied – droughts, methane eruptions, volcanic ash, the ongoing problem of asteroids, the orbit of an invisible sun, our motion through the spirals of the Milky Way – but there’s little doubt about the culprit behind the sixth extinction. Wake and Vredenburg list the proximate causes: ‘human population ...”

“... is not just characterised by masculine cragginess – by a ‘Promethean head’ topped with ‘ash-blue quartz’: he is ‘intoxicated like a woman’ and, somehow, ‘pregnant’. McGuckian’s way into the aisling genre must, of course, be historical, but she characteristically picks her way through space time, and, relational here as always, stresses ...”

“... you are, sir: take this to your museum and tell them, this is ancient Rome.’ His Saint John on Patmos, one of the great moments in New York, is utterly alone in a landscape that teems with the evidence of people’s will to perpetuate their way of life. Cut stone is everywhere. The very slope of the hill is massively reinforced, so that the road ...”

“... like Bolivia or Paraguay. De Gaulle said that Chile was ‘the pilot country of Latin America’. John Gunther wrote in 1967 that Chile was ‘one of the most civilised countries in the world’, and that the general line of government was ‘roughly that of the New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt or even the British Labour Party’. There is not a hint of such ...”

“... way the kiln is loaded sets up wind currents that affect the circulation of the flame and ash, sometimes creating strong back eddies that will accentuate the asymmetric glazing typical of anagama pottery.’ The essay’s latent analogy is that of the kiln as the imagination, the transforming fire. Arctic Dreams, which was first published in 1986 and ...”

“... longest-running experiment in the history of science. The Park Grass Experiment, set up in 1856 by John Bennet Lawes at Rothamsted in Hertfordshire, has now been running more than five times longer than its nearest rival, and still yields results of use to plant ecologists. The original object was to assess the effects of different fertilisation regimes on a ...”

“... the antecedents of Webb’s Red House in the work of Butterfield and Pugin and indeed in John Nash, who might claim, if any one architect could, to have invented the architecture Muthesius so admired. But to the Edwardians Nash was still despicable as a stucco-peddling Neoclassicist, his houses ‘cheerless’ and ‘rectangular’. It was to the ...”

“... and was met by a near unanimous lack of critical acclaim. The screenplay was based on a novel by John Masters (1914-83), who had served in the British army in India before and during the Second World War. Masters’s family had had a relationship with India stretching back five generations; I have been told by elderly Indian army officers who served with him ...”

“... beach to a tourist diner. In the garish flashlight she looks like a body excavated from Vesuvian ash. When she reached the holidaymakers’ tables she tried to relieve them of their drinks. This was a real case of leglessness. After she died in 2011 a bar in Rodney Bay where she had been to drink renamed itself Rehab. It’s open all night. The tropical ...”