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“... Romanticism​ bequeathed a good many things to the beleaguered modern imagination, one of the most provoking of which was the thought that it should get out more. That bit of advice proved all the more challenging because it contradicted the other basic idea which the Romantics left behind – namely, that what mattered was staying inside, wrapped in the private world of subjectivity and ‘mental space ...”

“... Freud. But it is also because a past is not a thing to be discovered. As the analyst said, and as Richard Rorty has been saying in this journal, it is not discovered but made. Ronald Fraser was not trying to determine, like certain historians of former times, what his past ‘really was’. But there is some question of a pathogenic secret, of the recovery of ...”

“... minority sport, but in the late Nineties it suddenly looks like the critical craze of the moment. Richard Wilson, for example, published an article in the TLS a few months ago reviving the claim that the young William Shakespeare can be identified with the actor William Shakeshafte who is named in the will of one of Edmund Campion’s Lancashire Catholic ...”

“... and the PMA, despite all the inconvenience this entails. The curators at the two institutions, Scott Rothkopf and Carlos Basualdo respectively, decided that the shows should mirror each other across several themes in ten galleries each. Delayed for a year by the pandemic, the retrospective arrives when Johns has turned 91 – an essential figure in the ...”

“... celebrities ‘dress to kill’. And some of the words that appear on blocklists are surprising. Scott Gatz, of the LGBTQ-oriented US electronic publisher Q.Digital, tells me that one big advertiser entered into a direct deal with it to advertise alongside its Pride coverage, but no ads then appeared on Q.Digital’s websites. He asked to see the blocklist ...”

“... not said. Field Marshal Montgomery sounds lonely, wistful and odd; the twenty-year-old Cliff Richard sounds painfully young, schoolboyish and eager to please. By the 1970s, however, Plomley’s questioning had begun to seem creaky. To the growing frustration of a cohort of radio execs, he rebuffed all attempts to tweak the programme, and went on, Hendy ...”

“... to Crete or Vienna, then jetting off to America on publicity tours or visiting Dublin to work with Richard Burton on the film of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. In time, it ruined his marriage. Cornwell became passionately involved with the writer James Kennaway and his wife, Susan, a glamorous couple described by one friend as ‘...”

“... more.’ The phrase picks up old slogans from Thomas Wolfe (‘You can’t go home again’) and Scott Fitzgerald (‘“Can’t repeat the past?” he cried, incredulously. “Why, of course you can”’), but it also adds its own, Vietnam-nourished insight. Willard has changed, but home has changed too, transformed itself into an idea only other people ...”

“... turn one of them off. It’s a good service, a model, with none of the speakers – his two sons, Richard Eyre and Robert Bathurst – outstaying their welcome and Ben vividly recalled.Bathurst is particularly good, reading a Betjeman poem about golf, following it up with a very funny (and almost better) poem in parody by Ben himself. Since I know him chiefly ...”

“... or the magical or any such claptrap. I despise myths and legends and their ilk. I believe that Richard Dawkins does not go nearly far enough when he says that astrologers should be prosecuted for fraud. Instead, priests and imams and monks and rabbis from every religion should be thrown into prison, unless and until they can prove the truth of their ...”

“... and torturing thousands of others. One of the Americans involved in the plot was Major-General Richard Secord, who had resigned from the air force in 1983 after being accused of improper dealings with a former CIA officer. Secord, who had a long career in special operations, pleaded guilty in 1989 to a felony count for lying to Congress about his role in ...”

“... Thomas Wolfe and T.S. Eliot and – judging by the appearance of ‘ceaselessly’ here – F. Scott Fitzgerald:This was the thing that drew men and women together: not the meeting of minds nor of spirits, not the conjunction of bodies in the dark insanity of copulation – none of these. It was the tenuous need to create a bond, a tie more fragile than ...”

“... Ernest Hemingway, Robert Lowell and his circle, D.H. Lawrence, Joseph Conrad, Edgar Allan Poe, Scott Fitzgerald and Edmund Wilson,’ adding that he is now writing a life of Humphrey Bogart. Popular biographies written at such speed need to claim some new revelatory hook on which to hang sales. The Kay Morrison hook might have been harmless had it been ...”

“... compared the action to that of an animal in his zoos. The Christian editor of Private Eye, Richard Ingrams, who has lately, after a lifetime spent in the publication of sneers and lies, gone to his reward in the shape of a column in the country’s most snobbish newspaper, came out with a piece headed ‘All’s well that ends Elwes.’ Masters is ...”

“... Sun, which hadn’t even been under investigation. Among the first officials to be arrested were Richard Trunkfield, a prison officer who had sold details about James Bulger’s killer Jon Venables; Alan Tierney, a Surrey police constable who was paid £1250 for passing information that John Terry’s mother had been cautioned for shoplifting, and Ronnie ...”