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“... Shortly after the Canary Wharf bomb, John Major, speaking in the House of Commons, said: ‘As for the relationship between Sinn Fein and the IRA, I think that they are both members one of another.’ Sinn Fein, he continued, would now have to decide whether it wanted to be a constitutional party or continue as a front for the IRA ...”

“... course of the week. The majority’s loyalties remained with the Home Rule party and its leader, John Redmond. Ever since Parnell had been hailed ‘the uncrowned king of Ireland’ in the 1880s, the majority of nationalists had supported the parliamentary campaign for Home Rule, hoping that Westminster could be persuaded or cajoled into devolving ...”

“... has not had consistent backing inside or outside academia, on the left or on the right, and Aileen Kelly’s new biography is unlikely to provoke a revival, or the sort of steady engagement that has continuously enlarged the reputations of Marx and Nietzsche. Unlike Marx, his acrimonious rival, Herzen did not provide a systematic diagnosis of the suffering ...”

“... compared to the exaggerations of the Bush Administration and its emissary to Pyongyang, James Kelly. Coming into office when the CIA’s ‘one or two devices’ estimate was nearly a decade old, Bush contrived to hype the threat, while at the same time downplaying the idea that its size made a difference: the North might have two or six or eight atomic ...”

“... myself rooting privately for Germany, though as I was sitting next to one of JM’s bodyguards [John Major was still prime minister], even though he was a Scot, I pretended to be backing England. It was one of the most incredible matches I’ve ever seen and to be fair to England, they could and should have won and there was a part of me willing them ...”

“... Anderson, as she then was, began singing in coffee houses for chump change. When her daughter, Kelly Dale, was born, she put her into care. ‘That really tore her apart,’ said Vicky Taylor, another folk singer with whom Mitchell shared an apartment. ‘She knew that she couldn’t be a single mum and do anything with her music. It was a really hard ...”

“... In the massive, magisterial The Best American Short Stories of the Century edited by John Updike, Flannery O’Connor is included with one of her much anthologised stories, ‘Greenleaf’, while McCullers and Capote are not only absent, but their absences have gone unremarked by reviewers. Fifty years ago, such a state of affairs would have been ...”

“... lodge, and, when they failed to recant, to be racked in the Tower.’ He searched his friend John Petit’s house for heretical literature and left him in prison, untried. He applauded the burning of a harmless leather seller called John Tewkesbury, noting: ‘There never was a wretch, I wene, better worthy.’ And he ...”

“... before telling me I was the latest visitor in a tradition of literary visitors stretching back to John Milton. He said it very kindly, but I wanted to laugh. However, something high in his red cheeks warned me neither to laugh nor to make any reference to Paradise Lost. I simply smiled and composed my wits and followed him over the black and claret tiles to ...”

“... The third factor, it becomes increasingly clear, was the commercial failure of his play Faustus Kelly, now made available to us again in this edition of O’Brien’s Plays and Teleplays. Daniel Keith Jernigan, the book’s editor, oddly claims in the body of his introduction that the play ran at the Abbey Theatre for ‘nearly two months’ in 1943, though ...”

“... to say rival) in this quest is Scott Eyman, an American expert in movie history. His book on John Wayne from 2014 is extraordinary for its revelation of awkwardness in a cinema celebrity. Eyman has also written excellent books on Ernst Lubitsch, Cecil B. DeMille and John Ford, and about the moment when sound changed ...”

“... Berlioz’s full conversion took place after hearing a performance of Iphigénie en Tauride. As John Rice argues here, a number of arias in les Danaïdes are written in a simple and affective melodic style reminiscent of parts of Orfeo and La Rencontre imprévue, and several of their contemporaries thought of the two composers in the same breath. Salieri ...”

“... the Persians, or perhaps by a renegade Roman soldier. Others believed God had taken no chances. John Malalas, the author of a sixth-century chronicle of the world that began with the Creation, reported a dream in which a bishop transported to heaven witnessed an enthroned Christ instruct the martyr-saint Mercurius: ‘Go forth and kill the emperor ...”

“... of Paris) in April 627: ‘“The world perishes and those things that are in the world” (1 John 2:17). That, however, which has been transferred to the churches, to the shrines of saints or to the poor never perishes, and is reckoned an everlasting reminder of justice.’ Two centuries​ before the pious Theodila, the heretic Pelagius had advocated a ...”

“... is regularly cited, not least by David Thomson, as the film that ‘killed the movies’. Glenn Kelly’s answer, in his introduction to A Galaxy Not So Far Away: Writers and Artists on 25 Years of ‘Star Wars’ (Allison and Busby, £9.99), is: ‘Get over it, Dad.’ This selective quotation slightly misrepresents ...”