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“... 12 October 1996, I was no longer in the stands … We were playing away at Blackburn Rovers. Ian Wright scored twice. Victory! On the way to the stadium, the players were chanting: “We want our Mars Bars!” I had started to work with them and apply my ideas, particularly as regards nutrition.’ The football played in England today – the speed, the ...”

“... possibility, charged with answering back to power, and he quoted with approval the sociologist C. Wright Mills: ‘The independent artist and intellectual are among the few remaining personalities equipped to resist and to fight the stereotyping and consequent death of genuinely living things.’ You could hardly put into one sentence more of what Carey ...”

“... painters, sculptors, architects, gem-carvers and engravers – from the Adam brothers to Wright of Derby. In Britain as elsewhere in Northern Europe and, indeed, in the states of Northern Italy, a visit to Rome was deemed an important if not an essential part of an artist’s education, although some who did not make it – Hogarth and ...”

“... traditional conservative support could no longer be counted on. He set a tremendous trap for Jim Wright, the machine-made Texan Democratic Speaker, and sprang the trap with a tremendous clang. (Oddly enough, Wright’s indiscretion concerned a book he had written, the royalties of which were said to be creatively ...”

“... any case such stories were rather put in the shade by the bristling denunciation of the visit by Robert van Tonder, leader of the tiny right-wing Boerestaat (Boer State) Party. Mrs Elizabeth Windsor, he said, was not welcome in the Boerestaat of the Orange Free State and the Transvaal: she was, after all, the great granddaughter of ‘a cruel queen who was ...”

“... voluptuous rebirth.’ There aren’t many skeletons left in Hardwick’s closet. Since 1973, when Robert Lowell published The Dolphin, a series of sonnets based on Hardwick’s letters to him during the breakdown of their marriage, the story of her life has been bound up with, and contorted by, his overbearing presence. Cathy Curtis, author of the first ...”

“... at the church across the square and she overheard them at a nearby table fumbling for a line of Robert Browning’s ‘The Lost Mistress’:Tomorrow we meet the same then, dearest?May I take your hand in mine?Mere friends are we – well, friends the merestKeep much that I resign …Yet I will but say what mere friends say,Or only a thought stronger;I will ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... trip. Whereas the Argentine showed extreme carelessness in the maintenance of his machine, Robert Persig meditated deeply on the importance of caring for the equipment we use. Che might have sympathised with some of Persig’s insights, but he would also have found them uncomfortable: ‘If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the ...”

“... arms deals, the drug-smuggling operations, and the still unconfirmed CIA activities described by Robert Woodward in Veil. While fully agreeing with many of her views, I think Didion is slightly naive, as if the Cuban exiles of Miami were the only such group with émigré interests at work in the US Government and its entrepreneurial adjuncts. Think of the ...”

“... Rose [Lee] virus’. Although Davis strings us along for a page, this bit is from a 1952 Robert Heinlein novella. One hundred million house mice did indeed overrun the Southern Californian town of Taft in 1926, and the picture of ‘Federal men killing mice’ with what look like scythes is a documentary photograph not a science fiction film ...”

“... two antitheses which he does not appear to recognise: the contrast between Belfast and what Frank Wright calls the ‘unreformable’ decaying border areas, and between Ulster as the last representative of a British tradition and the rest of Britain which has, in the eyes of very many Protestants, betrayed it. The Ulster state was never a monolithic ...”

“... film, including the first stark naked one (seen by the audience chastely from the back), by Maggie Wright in an RSC production of Marlowe’s Dr Faustus. Such economies are prudent, but the boundaries between representations of Helen and of the politics of war keep collapsing, and it’s a pity to ignore the sharp and timely elements in Helen’s story that ...”

“... signs of fresh pictorial intelligence in the exhibition come from two Englishmen, John Michael Wright and John Riley, whose portraits presage the comic tones of the 18th century, and from the Flemish Jacob Huysmans. Huysmans, like Orazio Gentileschi before him, was a protégé of the queen whose waywardness could be indulged: his portrait of Queen ...”

“... by painters especially. Brueghel in the 16th century, David Teniers in the 17th, and Joseph Wright in the 18th, all painted grimy scenes of reclusion and penury, with hints of mad obsession and radiant wonder. Cornelis Pietersz Bega’s alchemist, from 1663, adds pathos to the mix: were it not for the delicately held apothecary’s scales, this ragged ...”