“... on Irish radio in 1995 and published in The Great Irish Famine: The Thomas Davis Lecture Series, James Donnelly remarked thatthroughout the rest of the Famine years, the Gregory clause or ‘Gregoryism’ became a byword for the worst miseries of the disaster – eviction, exile, disease and death. When in 1874 Canon John O’Rourke, the parish priest of ...”

“... horses. Dick Haymes was a brutal, abusive, manipulative drunk. Her brief marriage to the director James Hill was a last misconceived attempt to find calm and stability away from the film business. It was typical of her that she had chosen a man determined to reestablish her career. She was divorced from him by the judge who had married her to Orson Welles 18 ...”

“... on and off, since last September. As the crew packs up I go and have another look at the tomb of Henry III’s children in the south ambulatory which I’ve just read incorporates one of the medieval relics of the Abbey, the stone supposedly with the imprint of Christ’s foot when he took off for the Ascension. I’m not sure if this is the square stone on ...”

“... almost everyone had access to a radio, though not in the gentlemen’s clubs of Pall Mall and St James, where they were banned, or in the Palace of Westminster, where MPs needed to gather around an MP’s car parked outside if they wanted to hear a horse race or a cup tie. Under the Presbyterian influence of its first director general, Lord Reith, until 1938 ...”

“... been that son of Yorkshire Jimmy Savile who seemed made from marzipan. But not now. No cake for James.7 August, Oxford. To Oxford and the Holywell Music Room where Bodley’s librarian emeritus David Vaisey and I have a conversation about our time at Oxford in the 1950s. David and I were first aware of each other at the scholarship examination in Exeter ...”

“... of Europe’. Ventriloquism remained a favourite theme for hyperbole throughout the 19th century. Henry Cockton’s novel The Life and Adventures of Valentine Vox, Ventriloquist, first serialised in the 1830s and still in print when Queen Victoria died, popularised the implausible idea that ventriloquists can ‘throw’ their voices like squibs and leave ...”

“... frontier on which Japan is plainly stalled is what we might call the Maine line. Sir Henry Maine (1822-88), the British founder of comparative jurisprudence, memorably laid down that a commercial, or as we might say capitalist, society evolves ‘from status to contract’. This implies a need for armies of lawyers to draw up the contracts, and ...”

“... is what makes ‘On Being Brought from Africa to America’, in Walker’s terms, ‘sickly’. Henry Louis Gates Jr called it ‘the most reviled poem in African American literature’. It contributed to the view of readers in the 1960s and 1970s who, informed by Black nationalism and the Black Arts Movement, found nothing in Wheatley’s poetry but ...”

“... years he just got hotter and hotter, probably helped, as he himself acknowledged, by the death of James Dean in 1955. Dean had been slated to play the middleweight boxer Rocky Graziano in Somebody Up There Likes Me; Newman was asked to replace him.‘By now, I’d become something of a movie star,’ Newman said of the success of Cat on a Hot Tin ...”

“... in 1939 in the avant-garde Paris literary journal Volontés, which also published Raymond Queneau, Henry Miller, Octavio Paz and Pablo Neruda.Return to My Native Land is often situated in the French literary tradition, and discussed in relation to Césaire’s major stylistic influences – Lautréamont, Claudel, Rimbaud, Apollinaire. But the poem is also part ...”

“... Manley Hopkins and John Millington Synge, whose work he would defend vehemently; he met the young James Joyce, who declared him ‘very loquacious’. If Yeats liked someone, he made a sketch of them or even a portrait. He was not too bothered if they did not pay. ‘I painted for nothing when I could not get the money,’ he said years later. ‘In Dublin ...”

“... Willem de Kooning had a show ‘that sold out on its first day and netted $150,000’. The artist James Rosenquist caught a glimpse of Johns around this time: ‘One winter morning I walked out of my building, and along came this four-door Jaguar sedan. At the wheel was Jasper … With his first money he’d bought a coat and a Jaguar … I was happy to see a ...”

“... be made in time to affect the course of the war. The Frisch-Peierls memo that found its way to Henry Tizard at the Air Ministry in March 1940 changed things in two respects: first, it suggested that a weapon might after all be a practical possibility; second, it was, at the time, something the British knew that the Americans did not, giving Britain yet ...”

“... Shakespeare turns chronicle into history, then history into drama, and then – in the superb Henry IV plays – historical drama into something almost like myth: free-standing, undocumented and legendary works of art. Two hundred years before the novel emerged in Europe, and psychology became a dominant language of experience, Shakespeare brought about ...”

“... it ‘rather dreary’. The following year, when Another Country appeared, he made his position on James Baldwin clear: ‘I loathe Jimmy’s fiction: it is crudely written and of a balls-aching boredom.’ In 1960 he found something he did like. He announced to David Selznick that ‘a delightful book’ called To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee was ‘going ...”