“... he is preoccupied with the images that come to define our collective and personal memories. Born Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve in 1921, Marker (one of his many pseudonyms) spent his childhood, depending on which story you believe, in Cuba, Mongolia or l’Ile aux Moines in the Morbihan. He attended the lycée Pasteur in Paris with ...”

“... and elephants from Persia and the rest of Western Asia. The Old Testament launched the Judaeo-Christian tradition on a different course that was equally unfortunate. The notion that God had given humanity ‘dominion’ over the beasts has been taken at times not simply as carte blanche but as a positive inducement to treat them badly. Hancocks says that ...”

“... Worship: the great Prayer Book Protest of 2000. Today, resistance is likely to come only from John Major’s little old ladies on bicycles, and from the Prayer Book Society – which may well have more members than those lobbies of fuel protesters. It was Cranmer’s intention that what was said in church should be ‘understanded of the people’. The ...”

“... circuit, but he was less familiar with the recording studio. He was ‘terrible’, his producer John Hammond recalled: ‘Bobby popped every p, hissed every s, and habitually wandered off mike.’ But in another sense he knew just what he was doing. The album was made in just six hours of studio time – two three-hour sessions – at a cost of around ...”

“... face lifted for the fourth time – the Doctors say no more), then Cecil [Beaton] and John Gielgud came to stay with us, and we went to Venice on Arturo Lopez’s yacht … Oh yes, I forgot Noel Coward – he fell in love with Jack. Jack hated it All. Later, in his thirties, he would tire also of the Greeks: ‘The children are so horrid: have ...”

“... for them. As lovers they are inept, incapable of communicating human warmth. Their prototype is John Coetzee, the subject of Summertime (2009), the third in Coetzee’s triptych of ‘autobiographical’ novels. Its metafictional conceit is that Coetzee has died and a biographer, writing about him in the 1970s when he was still making his way as a ...”

“... its wonderful detail. And yet I always feel that it’s with the Adoration of the Kings that the Christian story begins to go wrong; that the unlooked for display of material wealth and the shower of gifts, for all their emblematic significance, are a foretaste of the wealth and worldliness that were to ensnare the medieval Church; and while the ...”

“... over for the last forty years of his life and failed to finish. When his literary executor John Callahan appended some of these jottings to the end of ‘Juneteenth’, the ‘novel’ he extracted from two thousand manuscript pages, he gave Ellison the last word: the final note reproaches the editor from beyond the grave, along with the readers ...”

“... is also a vast outpouring of Bach recordings, which, until DGG curtailed the series, included John Eliot Gardiner’s amazing cantata performances. One of these took place every week for a year all over Europe and North America – the intention was to match the composer’s own Sunday series for the churches he served as choirmaster and organist. Yet ...”

“... fortress at Magdala in a fit of pique after Queen Victoria had refused his pleas for help, as a Christian, in his wars with his Muslim neighbours. The hostages were rescued, albeit at vast expense (the final bill for the expedition, at £9 million, was nearly double the original estimates), and Theodore committed suicide in his ruined fortress, shooting ...”

“... extracts from a video taken from an interview carried out by an eminent neurologist, Professor John Hodges, and presumably taped for research purposes. It’s sanctioned, one imagines, by John Bayley, whose efforts on behalf of his late wife and her reputation make Max Clifford seem timid and retiring. One lesson of this ...”

“... and dust in Sacramento would be like a plague or a curse – so that Joan’s new husband, John Gregory Dunne, when he came to visit, would use a mischievous finger to write ‘DUST’ here and there. Dunne, who died at the end of last year, was tall, handsome, articulate, funny – the man of the world behind whose attractive show Joan hid and ...”

“... for Doris Day, the moment from which her longheld stage fright sprang. ‘This shy goddess,’ John Updike once wrote, ‘who avoids parties and live audiences, fascinates us with the amount of space we imagine between her face and her mask.’ The images of Doris Day (that blonde hair, those white teeth) and her personas as the spunky girl next door, the ...”

“... spoke out against the Camorra and was shot dead in his church when Saviano was 16. Without being a Christian, Saviano feels a strong affinity for Don Peppino and in particular for the priest’s insistence on ‘the priority of the word’, as witness and accusation, the word that ‘can track down money from its stench’, the word that must be ‘put at the ...”

“... remained unpublished until 1534. It caused outrage among keen Arthurians, as shown for instance by John Leland’s furious Assertio inclytissimi Arturii Regis Britanniae of 1544, in which he insisted that the whole Arthurian legend was absolutely true, listed the 149 knights of the Round Table to prove it, wrote Polydore off as a damn ...”