“... confident than ever in the object of his faith.’ Tried and tested, Cash comes forth as gold. In James Mangold’s much-hailed biopic, Walk the Line, the mythic retelling of Cash’s story is, naturally, Greek rather than Christian, Hollywood’s standard method being to take the legacy and the legends of the Greeks and to give them a little Christian twist ...”

“... him with cream from a nearby milk-house. He is wakened from his 19th-century reverie by an irate porter from Winchester College with an alsatian, and an officious College river keeper, who angrily strut up and down beside him on the bank, affronted by the sight of his rubber-blubbered body in their watery patch. They shout out repeatedly: ‘Does that fence ...”

“... November 1983) Peter White has thrown the Tyacke thesis into question. He contends (as H.C. Porter has long done) that the pre-Laudian Church was never narrowly Calvinist. Yet at least White and Tyacke can find common ground in their emphasis on the 1620s: a decade which Hugh Trevor-Roper has compared, in his vivid re-creation of its effect upon the ...”

“... homes, and he improved. Thanks to the admirable efforts of Sydney J. Freeberg, now Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Fine Arts at Harvard, Bobby returned there, on a graduate programme. But no good. There was a history of riding fast – on horses at the ranch, or on bikes in the city: Bobby died on 12 January 1965, after bashing into an Eighth Avenue bus on ...”

“... Tailor – ‘a device so simple that it left him genuinely elated by its symmetry’. Clive James, writing in 1977, had similar feelings about the ‘symmetrical economy’ of The Spy who Came in from the Cold (1963). ‘It could,’ he said, ‘be turned into an opera.’ Le Carré – that is, David Cornwell, an ex-spy – once said that he entered ...”

“... One from 1965 named Prell after its central component, a very green shampoo, was well described by James Schuyler: A dozen bottles of Prell – that insidious green – terrible green roses and grapes, glass dangles like emeralds, long strings of green glass beads, a couple of strands looped up. Under glass, in the centre, a blue-green pietà, sweating an ...”

“... asleep standing at his post; instead of replacing him with a fresh employee, the company set a porter to travel with him and nudge him when he looked as if he was nodding off. The drawn-out struggle by rail unions for better conditions and decent pay against unsympathetic employers – and against the ‘railway interest’ in Parliament, where by 1873 ...”

“... on realist prose and painting, and his new book is a commentary on Emerson, Whitman, Melville, James and Twain, among others, with significant asides on Thomas Eakins and Winslow Homer. It aims to look freshly at these artists and to ask again why their originality matters. Names like Stevens, Eliot and Ashbery are frequently dropped and sometimes ...”

“... is more direct: ‘Erected to the memory of the heroes … Stephen Decatur Parish, James West Hadnot, Sidney Harris, who fell in the Colfax Riot fighting for White Supremacy, April 13, 1873.’ When EJI arrived in Montgomery there were more than fifty memorials of one sort or another to the glories of the Confederacy. They included a gold star ...”

“... When We talk of narrative poetry today,’ James Fenton asks in the September issue of Poetry Review, ‘are we referring to the kind of story in which, you want to know what happens next? I think not. I think that kind of story is deliberately excluded from consideration.’ It’s a well-timed question, with Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion’s advocacy of narrative in The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry being so widely and respectfully read, and well-directed too, since it clarifies what’s confused in the Penguin introduction by the editors’ simultaneous recommendation of Post-Modernist ‘secrecy’ and the Keatsian ‘long poem ...”

“... and poetic traditions of the earlier 18th century, especially the philologist-philosopher James Harris and the poet James Thomson, author of The Seasons. Actually, it might be truer to say that Barbauld’s most remarkable achievement was to complicate the tenor of most Unitarian writing by including stuff that its ...”

“... his undergraduate writing, part of a generalised admiration for the world of the New Yorker, Cole Porter musicals and the Algonquin Round Table. I don’t mock the progression. My own was identical. Films implanted his obsession with stardom, the making and wearing of those golden masks with which his favourite performers ...”

“... from 1951, features Margaret Lockwood (best known for playing feisty period heroines opposite James Mason, who himself did Desert Island Discs in 1961 and 1981) sounding as if she’s narrating a public information film: the Eton boating song ‘conjures up for me a very pleasant English scene’.When the BBC switched to recording on tape, which could be ...”

“... place in southern Nigeria, in December 1905, in the village of Ahiara. The villagers had killed Dr James Stewart, an officer who had arrived in their village on a bicycle. Major Trenchard, aged 32, was the commander of the force in charge of the subsequent massacre. The historian Johnson Asiegbu interviewed people in the area in 1978, and found that some still ...”

“... a matter of days,’ Ross writes, ‘he had become the man of his book.’ The 20-year-old James Boswell was inspired to verses in which the success of Tristram Shandy was conflated with the novelist’s own éclat. He pictured the author who was also his own character, enjoying his celebrity as he made his appearance in London’s most fashionable ...”