“... The pub has become as much a restaurant as it is a place to have a drink. It is owned by Greene King, the brewing company, and run by a Polish woman who lives upstairs. It is full most evenings: customers smoking cigarettes stand on the pavement. One of the barmen is from Stettin – ‘Paris of the Baltic’, as he likes to say – and studied politics at ...”

“... to deal with miscarriages of justice. It noted the criticism of the Home Office made by Sir John May, who led an inquiry into the cases of the Guildford Four and also the Maguire Seven, whose convictions were quashed in June 1991. May wrote that the Home Office’s ‘approach … was throughout reactive, it was never thought proper for the department ...”

“... took him for a cattle rustler, whipped him and chased him away. Fridolin complained to Clovis, king of the Franks, and returned with a signed charter granting him the island, as well as two messengers who threatened any dissenters with immediate execution.Fridolin established a nunnery, but he needed funding for the abbey. Things seemed to look up when ...”

“... and, asked this question, their spokesman replied, to general applause: ‘MacDonalds, Burger King and American TV’. But perhaps some others long for gourmet restaurants, Krug Cabernet Sauvignon ’74, and musak in Orange County; or, altogether more understandably, Sunday brunch at the Clift in San Francisco. The trams are not running in that city, but ...”

“... If a comparison is wanted I should describe myself as the Marriott of the 20th century. Sir John Marriott wrote textbooks of 19th and 20th-century history. They are fairly competent and duller than mine but they enabled me to pass examinations. Marriott was also Conservative MP for York, hence a more successful politician. He was slightly to the right ...”

“... frightfully useful contacts; and it wasn’t his fault, though he knew he ought to be fighting the King. You understand, I am puzzling about what was at the back of his mind when he wrote these few extremely magical poems.’ The insistence that even the most magical of poems is susceptible to rational analysis sits quite comfortably with an unanalysed taste ...”

“... Giles Foden and Ann Harries have produced new examples of the genre. In his first novel, The Last King of Scotland, Foden brilliantly re-created the Uganda of General Amin, portrayed with increasing horror through the eyes of a naive young Scottish doctor. He evidently remembers Uganda very well (as I can vouch, having lived there a little earlier) and, in ...”

“... turns. At first it seems as if it is going to be a biographical account of the trickster figure of John Laroche, one of the thieves in question. Laroche is an obsessive collector, having been through passionate affairs with turtles, fossils and tropical fish before committing himself to orchids – at least for some of the time Orlean knew him. It is at a ...”

“... war broke out, Cantos 52 to 71, known to initiates as the Chinese History Cantos followed by the John Adams Cantos, seem to him as to many of us wrongly conceived as well as sloppily executed. His dislike of them takes a special turn, however, when for the failure of the Adams sequence he blames John Adams, not ...”

“... had to back-translate FitzGerald’s quatrains into Persian. Baron Corvo did a version; Augustus John supplied the images for a translation into Romany Welsh. More recently, W.G. Sebald searched out FitzGerald’s grave in the churchyard in the village of Boulge in Suffolk, and, in the same way that FitzGerald chose to speak through Omar Khayyám, Sebald ...”

“... The Nazis took movies very seriously. Urwand opens his book by recounting a discussion of King Kong in 1933 by members of a committee convened to decide whether the film could be ‘expected to damage the health of normal spectators’. The expert witness from the German Health Office thundered that it was ‘nothing less than an attack on the nerves ...”

“... disguising the occasional approach of ‘the ogres that were then still native to this land’. King Arthur is remembered not just as a legend but as someone it was possible to serve. Britons and Saxons live in separate communities but with a certain amount of overlap, any tensions kept below a simmer. You could describe events in the book as ...”

“... internalised version of the mother. We can’t be sure of the effect of the lost mother on the king penguin, but we can be in no doubt that it matters greatly to England’s royal family. In his essay ‘The Place of the Monarchy’, Winnicott helps us gain traction on the problem: ‘It is in the personal inner psychic reality that the thing is ...”

“... of ‘aliens’ in various guises, including those appearing in monster-breeding films such as King Kong. As Warner makes clear in her opening lecture, myths are very versatile, though it is a piece of social engineering to pretend that a myth-story is always the same, and the same from time immemorial, because it is true. Actually, myths renew and ...”

“... for state authority thus to associate peace with terror. In Shakespeare’s Henry VIII, the King’s infant daughter is praised in a powerful prophecy: ‘She shall be loved and feared,’ and her royal attributes shall be ‘peace, plenty, love, truth, terror’. Our disputations about the nuclear deterrent are connected with the suspicion that it ...”