“... Riders, the first book he appears in. His fiancée, Helen, spends all her savings on an Augustus John drawing of a horse for his wedding present. She gives him it, goes to answer the doorbell, and when she comes back fifteen minutes later finds him looking at the drawing with satisfaction. ‘That’s better.’ ‘What?’ said Helen. Then, noticing a ...”

“... Administration. The great cult film of all time in this respect is George Axelrod’s and John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate, withdrawn from circulation after the Kennedy assassination but now available again in cassette form. And the great artistic and emblematic coincidence of the movie is the playing of the good guy by Frank Sinatra ...”

“... articulate. Biographers don’t forget the history of himself that Dryden was to have given John Aubrey, but that he never gave. Dryden adapted Shakespeare, out of confidence and from a sense of necessity. I have chosen Hamlet as a point of comparison between them – a comparison, after all, provoked by Dryden himself – for a reason best given by ...”

“... cool luminous reportage that reminds one of the work of our more storied essayists, Joan Didion or John McPhee. In the past few years the incidence of these big books has increased rapidly: three years ago, Christopher Bram published his Washington tale, Almost History; in 1994, Laura Argiri’s 19th-century melodrama The God in Flight came out, along with ...”

“... in his Ciuile Conuersation (1586), simply part of his master; and ‘to be no part of any body’, John Donne wanly observed – having failed to secure a place to which he had ‘submitted himself’ – was ‘to be nothing’. By the same token, the public identity of a lord was dependent on his retinue of servants, whose principal function was to display ...”

“... educational ideals – the strenuous pursuit of knowledge and the cultivation of elevated tone and Christian character – Edward was to perpetuate in his own career. When he was still a student at Cambridge in 1850 his mother and eldest sister died, leaving him responsible for his five surviving siblings – his father had died when he was 14. An uncle, a ...”

“... his older brother, Jonathan (‘Yoni’), and grew up in Katamon, a neighbourhood dominated by Christian Arabs before the 1948 War. (A third son, Iddo, was born in 1952.) In 1963, the boys were uprooted when their father, convinced that he had been blacklisted by academia, moved the family to Elkins Park, a leafy suburb of Philadelphia. For a Revisionist ...”

“... George profoundly. By the time he arrived at St Aidan’s, a boys’ secondary school run by the Christian Brothers, he had been pegged as a misfit. One morning, he came into class with the hood of his duffle coat still up. He refused to put it down. So the Christian Brother yanked it, revealing a scraped and bloodied ...”

“... or rather J.J. Beegan did. When I turned to the Irish census records I could quite easily find John Beegan, who was born in 1868, the eldest child of John and Jane Beegan. In 1901 they were living together with the younger Beegans, Mary and Thomas, at 23 Dunlo Hill in Ballinasloe. On the census form, ...”

“... UK’s forced departure from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism in September 1992 had condemned John Major’s government to nearly five years of public disintegration, years in which the party’s anti-European ‘bastards’, as Major described them, reacted to the abrupt end of belief in Tory competence by doing their best to scupper his ...”

“... below a certain age. We shall be lucky if most of them have such benevolent ideas. The hero, Christian Slater, is trying to set up a drug deal, and needs to make contact with the man who will take him to the man. Where are they to meet? He asks his wife, Patricia Arquette, and she says at the zoo in the script, at the roller-coaster in the film. They ...”

“... in whom the realms of death and life crossed inextricably. It was a topic that Thomas, no more Christian than Empson was, found equally compelling. ‘I care not a damn for Christ,’ he told Hansford Johnson, no doubt hoping to impress, ‘but only for his symbol.’ He liked to refer to ‘Jack Christ’, as though divinity were conjoined with the sort ...”

“... had its adversaries: members of Reagan’s brains trust, meeting in 1980, declared it less Christian than Communist. ‘US policy,’ they said, ‘must begin to counter (not react against) . . . the "liberation theology” clergy.’ Aristide’s elevation from slum priest to presidential candidate took place against a background of right-wing death ...”

“... There is often a vacancy to his acting, which can give the illusion of mystery. The producer John Foreman recalled that Newman’s second wife, Joanne Woodward, once said to him: ‘If you think he’s thinking something, he’s not always thinking something.’In Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Newman hardly moves his eyes when he speaks – only his mouth. We ...”

“... existence under such titles as ‘Is Life Worth Living?’ and ‘What Makes a Life Significant’.John Kaag and Jonathan van Belle’s book is an anthology of these writings, from a letter James wrote when at Harvard Medical School in the 1860s to ‘A Pluralistic Mystic’, an argument against rationalising away mystical experiences that was published in ...”