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“... surprisingly elaborate constructions are erected, whether shaped by the genial indulgence of what Simon Russell-Beale called Greenblatt’s ‘love letter’ to Shakespeare, or by the hard-nosed iconoclasm of Katherine Duncan-Jones’s Ungentle Shakespeare (2001), whose determination ‘to bring Shakespeare down from the lofty isolation to which he has ...”

“... columnists, bloodlust aroused by the denunciations of the show on the part of Daniel Boorstin and Simon Schama, among others, tossed the following about on their bayonets as the quintessence of Political Correctness: In another passage Leutze raises (literally) the sacrifice issue again and turns it more conclusively against the Aztecs. Prescott describes in ...”

“... which was utterly devoid of intellectual content. And at no point more so than in her response to Simon Hughes’s intervention: full of fire but, in fact, a shrill incantation of the most wretched piece of right-wing folklore. My own guess is that history will judge this to be a disastrous combination of attributes, though I do not suppose Mrs Thatcher’s ...”

“... cartoons (arise Sir Steve Bell) or protest songs from Bob Dylan to today’s gifted lyricist, Theo Simon. ‘Subvertising’ against adverts and consumerism is excluded. Joseph Beuys doesn’t fit, nor do the contemporary artists who used melting ice sculptures to protest about global warming. The ‘laughing protest’, in which thousands of Indians protested ...”

“... gloss on Trump’s philosophy. In the first pages of his memoir, The Room Where It Happened (Simon and Schuster, £25), Bolton takes pains to lay out how busy he was before joining the Trump administration and how eagerly Trump’s team pursued him. The first jobs he was offered in the administration were not big or important enough: he turned down ...”

“... were going on at Mile End, another group of rebels dragged the archbishop of Canterbury, Simon of Sudbury, and the treasurer, Robert Hales, out of the Tower of London and beheaded them on Tower Hill. On 15 June the rebels and the king met again, this time at Smithfield. Their leader, Wat Tyler, failed to doff his ...”

“... 10 March. At 6:45 a.m. I set off by car service to Newark airport to catch the 10 a.m. Virgin/Continental flight to Gatwick. At this time of the morning the New Jersey Turnpike is too busy altogether. This use of altogether, I’m reminded by Terence Patrick Dolan in A Dictionary of Hiberno-English, means ‘wholly, completely’ and may be compared to the Irish phrase ar fad, particularly in its positioning at the end of a sentence ...”

“... Robert Chandler writes: ‘Life and Fate is the true War and Peace of this century, the most complete portrait of Stalinist Russia that we have or are ever likely to have.’ Chandler, who has had the herculean task of making a good translation of this long, moving and very remarkable novel, puts forward that claim in his Introduction ...”

“... Harry in Afghanistan in 2007 and 2008. He had several contacts at Broadmoor, including an orderly, Robert Neave (‘Tipster Bob’), whom he paid £9000 to supply him with news about the Yorkshire Ripper and other killers. The investigation had found an email suggesting that Pyatt paid a Thames Valley police officer – never traced – £1500 for a tale about ...”

“... by Tamara de Lempicka from 1933 – and Yvonne George, a Belgian cabaret star who swept the poet Robert Desnos off his feet. Members of the Brigade des moeurs were biddable, and liked to get a slice of the action, whatever it happened to be. They didn’t have much in the way of convictions, in any sense, especially when it came to pornography and drugs. The ...”

“... as ‘the most prominent UFO organisation in the United States’, the Hills consulted Benjamin Simon, a psychiatrist trained in hypnotic regression, who conducted sessions with them over the course of six months. The audio recordings of their conversations, available online, are disturbing. Describing the abduction, Barney in particular seems overwhelmed ...”

“... beyond help. The impression one gets of him from biographies and from Joyce’s descriptions of Simon Dedalus, the character based on his father in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, is of a patriarch who is such a dominating, magnetic and boastful presence that it is hard to imagine any son finding space beside him. It was never clear what being a ...”

“... warning – in mid-joke) could never have been told: neither as a book (Hill sold his account to Simon and Schuster to pay his legal bills), nor as a film. It is, moreover, a story worth telling, one which goes some way towards answering, at the non-theological level, Jeffrey’s wonder ‘Why are there people like Frank? Why is there so much trouble in this ...”

“... that pop music isn’t as good as it used to be, that commercialism has taken over. But some, like Simon Reynolds and Greil Marcus, emerge with their enthusiasms undiluted and are able to explore the links between the memorable moments and the groundbreaking acts, serving as a corrective to the inclination to see pop music as a series of unconnected ...”

“... the presidency, there were several attempts to restore the family to the office. JFK’s brother Robert was assassinated after his victory in the California Democratic primary in 1968. The immediate chances of a third brother, Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, were scuppered after the Chappaquiddick incident in 1969 – when a young female aide ...”