“... piece called Appalachian Spring in collaboration with Aaron Copland and Isamu Noguchi. In 1945, John Cage and Merce Cunningham would marry their exploratory sensibilities. All these artists were struggling, in the words of Lincoln Kirstein, who co-founded the New York City Ballet, ‘to impose a native meaning on a recalcitrant alien dance ...”

“... port, Chilean wine and so forth. One of the number could never get enough of the joke. This was John Braine, whose special party-trick was the skipping of ironic bits. When he said that England these days was run by the trade unions and the pansies, he meant it. When he went on about treason and the intellectuals there was grim, literal relish in his ...”

“... to know. He is often very funny. There are hilarious set-pieces at the expense of, for example, John Braine and Paul Johnson. For the Sake of Argument is not an easy book to précis. There are eight parts and 72 essays, the allocation of which is somewhat random. Most of the pieces in ‘Rogues’ Gallery’, for instance, could go equally well into ...”

“... been known to scholars for some time and which include the Gospel of Mary and the Apocryphon of John, they are the first large-scale and direct presentation of Gnostic beliefs: hitherto nearly all our knowledge has come from the descriptions (abusive but on the whole accurate) and excerpts given by their orthodox opponents. The roots of Gnosticism, a widely ...”

“... came the Second World War and a sudden upsurge in reputation, with Maurice Bowra, Stephen Spender, John Piper, Kenneth Clark, John Lehmann and others going hysterical about her: a kind of trendy Stringalong situation, we are invited to judge. Then by 1954 it is all over and the balloon deflated for good. Can my dislike of ...”

“... Little Constructions (2007), Burns’s second novel, in which the characters have names like John Doe and Jetty Doe and JesseJudges Doe and JanineJuliaJoshuatine Doe, has the same ferocious levity, but is even more intense. It’s an unsummarisable fantasia around sexual abuse and violence in the town of Tiptoe Floorboard, where ...”

“... their negligence was calculated, their private life ostentatious.’ Drinking and copulation are major themes of Rochester’s private correspondence, as of his public image. His advice to Nell Gwyn (conveyed through Henry Savile) on how to handle the King was ‘with hand, body, head, heart and all the faculties you have, contribute to his pleasure all you ...”

“... with Dr Küng is a little like chiding the Third International for not adopting the principles of John Stuart Mill in its dealings with Lukacs. And when therefore John Paul II – who, like Evelyn Waugh, as Randolph Churchill remarked to an earlier Pope, is himself a Roman Catholic – did not respond to Dr Küng’s ...”

“... New York journal on 18 February. This was not a new sentiment in the United States. In 1823 John Quincy Adams had suggested that ‘there are laws of political as well as of physical gravitation,’ so all New World Newtons ought to know what to do: if an apple, severed by the tempest from its native tree, cannot choose but fall to the ...”

“... whole event in some sane perspective? They cannot retreat into a grand carelessness until they are John le Carré or John Fowles. They might begin, however, by running through the list of previous winners and working out how many of the last 19 would feature in any ‘true’ list of Top 19 Novels 1969-87. They might observe ...”

“... in a certain order’. And he continues: The basic assumption of modern art – I speak of the major trends, those related to Matisse, Bonnard, Braque, Picasso, Soutine, Klee, Mondrian – is that the first concern of a work of art is to present a configuration of shape and colours and marks which in and of itself stimulates and satisfies, and that only ...”

“... it. From the really nice people he graduated to the ‘lurid and fashionable’, as Augustus John described the artistic set in Twenties Paris. It was the world of the Train Bleu, of Diaghilev, Cocteau, opium and neurosis; a brittle atmosphere vulnerable to clumsy intrusions. Wood had to flee in embarrassment when his uncle and aunt turned up on a ...”

“... Especially striking is her portrait of Christian (‘Bébé’) Bérard as a jovial latter-day John the Baptist, his head neatly suspended at the edge of a round pool as though on a tray. There are also distinctive fashion photographs, like the one of a model in a bathing-suit superimposed on a pattern of sun-dappled water; or another of a tiny sailing ...”

“... to reconfigure our understanding of power. At Berkeley he ran a seminar from which two other major books emerged: Peter Brown’s The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (1988), which explored the theme of carnality and spirituality, and Thomas Laqueur’s Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud ...”

“... his political manner contrasts pointedly with that of both his successors. About the second major theme of Westlake’s book – the extent to which the modern Labour Party, New Labour, is Kinnock’s creation – Roy Hattersley wrote last year that ‘the Blair Project is not a continuation of Neil Kinnock’s reforms. Kinnock wanted to establish a new ...”