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“... nation has been – superficially at least – far more harmonious. From Our ’Enry through Gary Mason and Big Frank Bruno (but not Joe Bugner, who was Hungarian, refused to play the game and was disliked by all on both counts) the cult of the deferential, smiling bruiser still holds sway. We expect our fighters to behave like Sergeant Paine in The Third Man ...”

“... On 3 April 1986, at his filling-station in north Dallas, Billy Jack Mason was protesting about the fall in the price of oil. Cars came from as far as Waco, and by breakfast, the queue was six miles long. He was offering unleaded at zero cents a gallon. Reporters sought Billy’s opinion on the future. ‘That’s overseas ...”

“... horses and carts and repurposed ploughs. People took whatever they could find. Francis Saveer, a mason, boarded the ship and managed to extract a piece of silk, eighteen rows of buttons, a jacket and a waistcoat. His servant took ‘two old jerkins and some old shirts’, which Saveer’s wife ‘threw away so soon as they were brought home’. Little Will ...”

“... Mary Patterson, married Lewis Sheridan Leary in 1858. The following year, Leary was recruited by John Brown for his suicidal raid on Harpers Ferry, and the bullet-riddled shawl that was eventually returned to Mary was in due course used as a blanket for the infant Langston (a middle name – he was baptised James, after his father). Mary’s next ...”

“... to play and the last man in. And it’s not for the sake of a ribboned coat,    Or the selfish hope of a season’s fame, But his captain’s hand on his shoulder smote –    ‘Play up! play up! and play the game!’ The sand of the desert is sodden red –    Red with the wreck of a square that broke – The Gatling’s jammed and the colonel ...”

“... wit nor Wyatt himself can change the mind of Henry VIII. ‘My head sticks’: that is both a hope and a horror, in that botched beheadings were not uncommon. Thomas Cromwell’s was particularly crude and butcherly. The Tower of London has been partially reconstructed since that day in 1536, and we cannot be sure if Wyatt literally saw Anne’s beheading ...”

“... of a short story is smitten by its charms: ‘it’s so cheap that anyone can buy it, and so I hope a great number of servants, as well as mistresses, will.’ But the Beeton publicity machine also latched onto a story in the Athenaeum (which it thereafter quoted on the book’s title-page) telling of a cook who was lent a copy by her mistress, and who ...”

“... Man Out, which was released in 1947. Bethnal Green masquerades as an expressionist Belfast. James Mason is an IRA gunman on the run. Twenty years later, his Hollywood career in decline, Mason returned once more to an East End of smoky pubs, dark shadows, charity hostels, to narrate a documentary version of Geoffrey ...”

“... and Guildenstern Are Dead enacts a bleaker Shakespearean inheritance. No touch of immortality or hope of salvation for these helpless courtiers. This is a drama preoccupied with its own fixed conclusion: ‘In our experience, most things end with death,’ Stoppard’s Player King remarks. But Stoppard, like Browning, allows himself to side with the ...”

“... ethics and politics, appraising his magisterial synthesis of Aristotelian and Christian thought. John Took asks ‘why Dante matters’ and responds by casting him as an existentialist philosopher. And in a retrospective collection of nineteen essays, Zygmunt Barański addresses the state of Dante studies today, reflecting on everything from his treatment of ...”

“... to go out to North America to report on the labour colonies set up by the Salvation Army in the hope of making men out of Britain’s derelicts, and to consider whether this was an idea on which the Government could build. General Booth’s Army was but one of many such organisations. The worst of them specialised in the arbitrary shipping abroad of ...”

“... many frantic images recur: women, with babies, lashed to the mainmast; crewmen racing aloft in the hope that, when the ship settles, the mast-top will still be above the waves; the pitching overboard of cargo and cannon to lighten ship and the jettisoning of masts; the battening down of hatches, causing panic and asphyxiation below; the frenzied toiling at the ...”

“... 2 of ‘Prufrock’) and Thomas Hardy’s ‘forms there flung/Against the sky’ (‘The Abbey Mason’); between ‘certain half-deserted streets’ (line 4 of ‘Prufrock’) and ‘he sought out a certain street and number’ in Chapter 20 of Little Dorrit; or, moving beyond literature, between that phrase and the recording of a payment made to ...”

“... a continuing record of high individual success: Tom, the pioneer in the discovery of photography; John the founder of the Royal Horticultural Society; and Josiah II, the head of a great family firm secure in the knowledge of its acknowledged fame and industrial leadership. All of these claimed achievements have something of a hollow ring when examined more ...”

“... of Desert Island Discs’ ten best episodes. Many included Yoko Ono on being hated and witnessing John Lennon’s murder, the actor Stephen Graham on his suicide attempt, Maya Angelou on childhood trauma, Simon Cowell boasting, Alfred Wainwright on his last walk in the Lakes as his eyes failed (‘the mountains wept for me that day’) and Tom Hanks moved to ...”