“... no private fortune. He would have been Master of Balliol if he had not been struck down. No Christian faith to support him. A very harrowing visit. My vision of myself pursuing an academic career did not last long, though as a postgraduate I was supervised by the Medieval historian K.B. McFarlane, who had, incidentally, shared a flat with Pares when ...”

“... of his uncle being a farm-labourer, or the blighted life of the intelligent, radical cobbler John Antell who married into the family. Instead, Hardy exaggerates the scale of the Rockhampton cottage where he was born, his father’s status in the social scale (he attributes his comparative lack of success in the building business to his being by nature ...”

“... new poem, and gave the poet a genial thumbs-up. Some years later Hughes told another variation to John Carey, to which he added some Jungian grace notes, and the probably too uncanny touch that the visitor was Hughes himself with a vulpine head. In Poet and Critic, an interesting edition of Hughes’s correspondence with Keith Sagar, we have yet another ...”

“... and comical vividness is the hallmark of Audenian experience, which occurs within situations, as John Bayley once charmingly put it, ‘which we can imagine occurring to the poet as he closes his eyes for a liberating instant between two minutes of actual living’. The poem plays with the idea of knowing things and conveys the feeling of being puzzled by ...”

“... the case with Alzheimer’s that illness uncovers truth, it seems both to Murdoch’s husband, John Bayley (‘Puss’), and to her biographer, Peter Conradi, that it did so here. In their view Murdoch’s advancing illness, crumbling away language and reason, laid bare in her an essential impulse toward love. As words broke up, it was the vocabulary of ...”

“... me. Officially, Iraq exported oil worth $10 billion in the first year of the American occupation. Christian Aid has estimated that oil worth up to an additional $4 billion may also have been exported and is unaccounted for. If this is correct, it would have created an off the books slush fund that both the Americans and their Iraqi allies could use with ...”

“... on the previous century’s instruments. ‘The violins of Cremona,’ the historian of music John Hawkins wrote in 1776, ‘are exceeded only by those of Stainer, a German, whose instruments are remarkable for a full and piercing tone.’ A French encyclopedia entry on the making of stringed instruments similarly argued that the violins of Jacob Stainer ...”

“... was recognised, but also accepted as the work of inevitable, evolutionary fate; the humane, Christian response was about soothing the dying pillow. The condition of the first Australians takes up less space in Australians: 1888 than in other volumes, but the findings of Henry Reynolds’s chapter on the subject are incisive: for most of the ...”

“... the Sierra Madre, and a friendly profile of its director in Life, led to an invitation to work for John Huston. He wrote an adaptation of Stephen Crane’s story ‘The Blue Hotel’, which Huston did not use but liked enough to give him another project, The African Queen. Later Agee collaborated with Charles Laughton on the screenplay of Davis Grubb’s ...”

“... is blasphemy? ‘I want the pope’s blessing,’ Andres Serrano said in an interview. ‘I am a Christian.’ If you give Serrano’s Immersion (Piss Christ) to students without telling them what it is, Hope told us that night, twirling her pasta, they will talk about the colour. Grading red from the edges to the centre, where the face drooping forward from ...”

“... to which were made by the English statistician R.A. Fisher, a eugenicist and a devout Christian who saw biological progress as evidence of God’s active and continuing role in nature, and whose centenary in 1990 was not a significant media event.You could point out that Darwin would have been regarded as a very great naturalist and considerable ...”

“... God in the real pantheism of this people-I.Fernando Pessoa, The Book of DisquietIt is the first or Christian name that counts, that is what makes one be as they are.Gertrude Stein, writing about Ulysses S. GrantIn autumn​ 1981, hot new act Prince was offered two nights at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum supporting the Rolling Stones. His first impulse was ...”

“... Intellectuals and the Masses (1992), his influential study of elitism in 20th-century literature, John Carey writes about the ‘duplicity’ of Joyce’s Ulysses, a novel supposedly about love for the common man, but written in such a forbidding way that the common man is unlikely to read it. Well, The Lord of the Rings is the opposite. It is a work written ...”

“... letters into battle to give their bodies a history. The United States Sanitary Commission and the Christian Commission, both founded for other purposes, devoted vast energy and time to helping relatives locate their kin in the Union army, alive or dead. There were no such systematic efforts in the South, but a variety of local relief ...”

“... of CBS, where he came up with a string of ideas for movies, including Fashion Beast (a life of Christian Dior), Wilde West (about Oscar’s lecture tour of America in 1882), The Rock ’n’ Roll Godfather (about Led Zeppelin’s hard-man manager Peter Grant), and something called Heavy Metal Surf Nazis. That gig ended after six months but McLaren stayed ...”