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“... there has been something of a religious revival in Johnsonian scholarship: one might think that Charles Pierce has arrived on the scene a little belatedly, but there is always room for a good book. The sermons have been properly edited for the first time, and a useful monograph on this subject written by James Gray. A pioneering study by Maurice ...”

“... tried in Denver, the book in question is The Turner Diaries. The FBI, who have labelled William L. Pierce’s prudently pseudonymous novel ‘the bible of the racist right’, didn’t take long to leak the information that it accompanied Timothy McVeigh on his (alleged) bombing raid on 19 April 1995. Reference to The Turner Diaries was prominent in Rage and ...”

“... who also shot Polanski’s The Pianist, as well as Taylor Hackford’s glossy biography of Ray Charles. This is important, because the movie is mostly about the way it looks. It’s meant to be a political thriller – based on Robert Harris’s novel The Ghost (the film has that title in the UK) – but it feels as if the writer went home halfway ...”

“... the mid-18th century; but despite a lineage that included her aunt, Sarah Siddons, her father, Charles, and her uncle, the great tragedian John Philip Kemble, Fanny herself was deeply ambivalent towards the theatre. She first aspired to be a writer rather than an actress; and it was only when the family faced bankruptcy that the latest Kemble was swiftly ...”

“... Charles Ray’s​ life-sized Young Man, machine-milled in 2012 from a solid stainless-steel block, is meant, Ray says, ‘to move forwards and backwards in increasingly irrelevant time’. The phrase is less opaque than it seems. His ambition was to make a kouros, but one modelled on the body of a long-time Los Angeles friend ...”

“... English poets. Sexually ambivalent, a notorious member of the gang of young roués at the court of Charles II, he nevertheless managed to write a few poignant and haunting poems which suggest that his public notoriety concealed a sensibility reacting to the intellectual crisis of the later 17th century. All my past life is mine no more;   The Flying hours ...”

“... of roadway unfurling through a quiet spring night. Behind the horse and rider, dots of light pierce the depths of the picture’s darkness; ahead, the clapboard houses are still sleeping. The strategic vantage point seems to anticipate the victory to come. Few other painters in the 1930s were able to match this inspired mix of history and legend, or do ...”

“... as ‘megalomaniac’. By 1920, Grieve was employed as a teacher in Caithness on the estate of Charles Perrins, the Worcester Sauce millionaire. The poet’s own verse still lacked the tang of excitement, but he had begun to look to a vast array of international writers for inspiration. Grieve was a late developer. Only in Montrose in 1922 did he ...”

“... On a mission to Prague in 1356 Petrarch was created a count palatine by the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles IV. But increasingly such advancements meant little to him. He turned down a professorship in Florence and an appointment as a papal secretary. The Virgilian urge to solitude and rustic reclusion was powerful: much of the Canzoniere was composed in ...”

“... its planning has focused on London and its environs, with schemes for Paternoster Square (Prince Charles helped to dash this one), Greenwich Peninsula, Bankside, Wembley and the Lower Lea Valley (including the Olympics master plan); and the same is true of its dock projects, which have included the Royal Albert Docks, Silvertown Docks and Convoys Wharf. Not ...”

“... Flecknoe, Absalom and Achitophel). There is panegyric: on Cromwell (Heroic Stanzas), on Charles II (Astraea Redux, To His Sacred Majesty), on the new baby heir to James II (Britannia Rediviva); though never on William and Mary. Theological disputation, first Anglican in complexion (Religio Laici), then Roman Catholic (The Hind and the ...”

“... strode into the Senate chamber shortly after the daily session had ended. Two days earlier, Charles Sumner, the Senate’s most outspoken critic of slavery, had delivered a five-hour speech, ‘The Crime against Kansas’. Sumner not only denounced the ‘rape’ of Kansas by pro-slavery forces, which had terrorised Northern settlers and sacked the town ...”

“... profundity is also signalled in the title – a quotation from Chief Seathl to President Franklin Pierce, which goes on to warn: ‘the whites too shall pass – perhaps sooner than other tribes. Continue to contaminate your bed and you will one day suffocate in your own waste.’ All this suggests that there is an important theme somewhere in the room. But ...”

“... the humid sentiment of the earlier poem is a new determination, inspired largely by Williams, to pierce the haze, to grasp things, people – ‘ourselves!’ – in the immediacy of perception. (Only the ‘dreamlike continuum’ could have found a place in ‘April’, but it would never have been used to describe a freeway.) After her first ...”

“... is more drawn to an earlier episode in Paris two months earlier. The proclivities of King Charles IX were gratified at a great feast marked by ‘an exceptionally vile pièce de resistance in which a bag full of live cats and a fox was suspended thirty feet up over a huge bonfire, until the flames pulled the screaming mass down’. To that episode, in ...”