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“... the wild landscape of the estate he owned in south-west Scotland. The setting is commemorated by John Haddington’s fine photographs, and the initiative richly documented by John McEwen (Keswick’s nephew), in Glenkiln. The sculpture by Moore which is most eloquent in this context is the bronze seated King and Queen of ...”

“... One time in four, and usually to everyone’s surprise, John Cheever’s heroes spring a wry and furtive victory over disappointment. Cheever is irresistible in describing those delicious moments of triumph when a dogged loser suddenly strikes a home run – like Farragut’s escape from the penitentiary at the end of Falconer ...”

“... I face More of the epic would be discovered under the sand as time went on. In 1990 Stephanie Dalley added more lines to her edition from newly recovered pieces, but most of what’s left has probably been smashed in the course of the Iraq wars. It seems proper that a place of fire and dust, its skin scarred by warfare, should be the origin of the story of the Flood today: devastation in negative, flood and drought bound together ...”

“... correctness gone mad’. (Criticism didn’t come only from the Right: see, for example, John Upton’s piece in the LRB, 1 July 1999.) The accusations Johnson had in mind might include an article about Macpherson by a certain Boris Johnson that appeared in the Guardian last February – in which the author wondered how ‘this sober old ...”

“... rulers nothing. Elizabeth I, in spite of ‘la mauvaise opinion’ which she held of Geneva after John Knox had written his First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women there, found it convenient to mouth pious concern for her distressed co-religionists abroad; she was less ready to give them armies or subsidies. Charles I, profoundly ...”

“... on Swift’s memorial tablet, a tablet that notably does not contain any mention of the usual Christian consolations – any hope of salvation or another life beyond this one. It is strange because Swift had distanced the satirical writings from his own feelings: they were written in the voices of personae whose attitudes and beliefs had been chosen ...”

“... Thames and Hudson volume Photomontage, which exposed a new generation to the interwar art of John Heartfield, George Grosz and Hannah Höch. The earliest of Linder’s collages have a graphic simplicity borrowed from fashion illustration, sometimes with a twisted take on ageing glam rock: one of the mocked-up female faces looks like Brian Connolly, the ...”

“... the Sunday Times and the Cricketer magazine published his pictures; many of them are reprinted in Christian Ryan’s new book on Eagar’s work during that year’s English cricket season, Feeling is the Thing that Happens in a 1000th of a Second (Riverrun, £20). These photographs made Eagar’s reputation. I was a boy at the time, and had a subscription to ...”

“... boat. This time, however, it was not the thought of pretty girls that diverted him but his friend John Evelyn’s ‘pretty’ new book ‘against Solitude’. Evelyn’s Publick employment and an active life prefer’d to solitude, published in 1667, was written to refute Sir George Mackenzie’s 1665 work, A Moral Essay, Preferring Solitude to Public ...”

“... of the Jewish village of Mifshata. Fassuta – a real place – is now part of Israel, and its Christian inhabitants belong to the 700,000-strong Arab minority inside the 1949 ‘green line’ of the Israeli state. Everyone in Fassuta has a story to tell, and the historical fact of dispossession means that this story is one of the few things they really ...”

“... chance of resuscitating an Aristotelian conception of practical reason than of restoring the Christian religion to cultural dominance. But in the judgment of some of the most acute participants in MacIntyre’s story – David Hume, for example, and more profoundly Machiavelli and Locke – it was the abandonment of Christianity which had by far the more ...”

“... of course, for Sam – whom they all called ‘STC’ in a sycophantic chorus, as he hated his Christian name – was blissfully happy in bed with Sara and never looked at Dorothy in that sort of way. And to turn the knife in the wound Sam had acquired such a lot of Wordsworthian self-righteousness, and if Sara spoke out at all would accuse her of being ...”

“... he were a Marxist: ‘You know, they say Jesus Christ was the first Marxist.’ Asked if he were a Christian, he replied: ‘You know, they often say that Christianity was the forerunner of socialism.’ Why did the real Zyuganov not stand up before the election? Perhaps because there was no real Zyuganov, any more than there was a real election platform with ...”

“... no longer mattered, and the nation ditched his serious music, retaining only ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ and ‘The Lost Chord’ for old times’ sake. Henceforth he would be taken – or left – as a minor though by no means negligible composer who found his true vocation in giving Gilbert’s marionettes brief but memorable moments of ...”

“... of a mass of detail, as if the sheer weight of her protestations would convince the world that John, as she calls him, was not guilty. It doesn’t work, even though one agrees that the coroner’s verdict naming Lucan as the murderer was unfairly reached, and it must have been a heartbreaking task. Marnham’s book is more reflective and very much ...”