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“... boomed aloud for all to hear: ‘Oh, do get a move on, you silly old pongers!’ Or the one about John Barrymore as Richard III, after a heavy pub-crawl with his co-star Wilfred Lawson, making such a hash of his opening soliloquy that a member of the audience called out. ‘You’re drunk!’– on which Barrymore approached the footlights and ...”

“... these sexual liberators, and the romanticising of an innately revolutionary gay sensibility, as in John Rechy’s Sexual Outlaw, but he sees radical possibilities in the ‘transgressive reinscription’ of such writers as Wilde, Genet or Orton, who undermine dominant structures of gender and class even as they appropriate and mimic them. Although he makes ...”

“... in the 1960s and 1970s. When visiting Duchamp on holiday in Cadaqués, Richard Hamilton and John Cage would try to avoid having to meet Dalí, whose villa was close by, and their hauteur is still felt by art historians and curators: Dalí was marginalised at the Hayward Gallery’s Undercover Surrealism exhibition in 2006, and at Tate Modern’s ...”

“... counter to the slow march of figures, taking the form of silent communication between Christ and John, their contact barred by a stern Roman officer, as the Virgin Mary faints. Some of the later narratives in the nave (scenes from the New Testament twinned with the Old) achieve a similar intensity, reducing the action to minimal but memorable formulae, often ...”

“... 155 east-west streets drawn on open land in 1807. The grid was a piece of real estate speculation (John Jacob Astor made his fortune not by trading furs, as American folklore has it, but by buying up blocks as the city pushed north); nevertheless, Koolhaas calls it, with Corbusierian hyperbole, ‘the most courageous act of prediction in Western ...”

“... not, Wilson felt compelled to pay his respects at West’s Funeral Home. He hung out at the pool hall and cigar store where the elders gathered. They called him ‘youngblood’; he called them ‘walking history books’, repositories of wit, customs, wisdom, some of which would find its way decades later into his plays. ‘I really wanted to know how they ...”

“... view. However, every truthful diary (even from such sturdy fellows as Edmund Wilson or Sir Peter Hall) shows up the writer in a ludicrous light, all the little manias and depressions exposed. Carrie is as Pooterish as her husband. Much of her time is devoted to plotting against him, devising schemes for moving the family away from boring Holloway to good old ...”

“... called the Angry Brigade, the language of whose communiqués (identified by a stamp made from a John Bull printing set) led the Met Bomb Squad to Ian Purdie and Jake Prescott (the former a left-wing activist, previously convicted for throwing a petrol bomb at the Ulster Office during a demonstration; the latter a drug-user and small-time criminal who’d ...”

“... In​ 1607 John Derpier, an argumentative Wiltshire gentleman, was hauled before an ecclesiastical court for publicly proclaiming ‘the most hereticall & damnable opinion (that there was noe god & noe resurrection, & that men died a death like beastes)’. Derpier’s audacity was compounded by the fact that he had made his assertion in a church and in the hearing of the impressionable youth of the parish ...”

“... I looked fat, dull and unmanly. The achievements of others, particularly those of my older brother John, stood in for anything that I might achieve myself, and afterwards a series of distinguished men were to step into John’s shoes. I acquired a spectacular ability to not see, identify or shrewdly evaluate people or ...”

“... either scholarly – new material come to light – or critical: new slant on a known personality. John Bierman does have some fresh material. ‘New documentary sources,’ he writes, ‘include the hitherto unpublished expedition journals of William Grant Stairs and memoirs of Alice Pike Barney’; he also pays generous tribute to Richard ...”

“... an important part of a concerted exercise in public persuasion. The same artist’s paintings of John Simpson’s ideas of how Paternoster Square would look if the latest Palladians were given control were a highly successful spoiling exercise which came very close to making people believe it was a real alternative to Arup Associates’ official scheme. An ...”

“... of Saddam Hussein remain unknown, but Tony Benn is alive and well and coming soon to a concert hall near you. Leaving Parliament in 2001 to devote more time to politics, Benn joined the B-list of political celebrities. He has appeared at the Glastonbury Festival and boasts his own website (www.tonybenn.com). As Tony Blair’s Government spins itself ...”

“... ran against Trump in the primaries; the two most prominent Republicans in the host state (Governor John Kasich and Senator Rob Portman); and scores of Senate and Congress members, governors and mayors nervously up for re-election, facing the prospect of having to defend or refute whatever would be Trump’s latest wacky pronouncement and losing voters either ...”

“... amused to read that the proposed finale of the annual Stonewall Equality Show at the Royal Albert Hall was to involve hundreds of gay volunteers marching onstage singing ‘We Are Family’ – an extreme example of Stonewall and its supporters’ current choice of a back-to-basics language, in which people of same-sex desire are portrayed as members of a ...”