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“... for the Megaliths’ by Paul Nash (1935) ‘The Destruction of Pompei and Herculaneum’ by John Martin (1822) ‘Sketch for Hadleigh Castle’ by John Constable (1828-9)PreviousNext Within it there are tantalising themes. The one which the Tate’s collection is best suited to develop is England’s relationship with ...”

“... Hollis, also out of a job, created his best-known and most widely disseminated work: the cover for John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (1972), the book that accompanied the documentary series. (Berger had taught Hollis drawing as a student, and Hollis also designed a striking jacket for his novel G.) The first episode opened with Berger wielding a Stanley knife in ...”

“... should ‘decide when would be the proper time to drop one’. According to Ann and John Tusa, Winston Churchill, then out of office, ‘went on a solitary rampage, growling that the Russians must be told to retreat from Berlin or “we will raze their cities.” ’ Perhaps he had only old-fashioned razing in mind. (Lord Boothby has put it on ...”

“... this context might ‘metaphoric’ mean? There can be no doubt, at least initially, about George Turner’s gripping and mordant The Sea and Summer, certainly his best book so far. It is set very much in a Science Fiction landscape, that of the ‘drowned world’ of the middle future, where the abandoned tower blocks of Melbourne stick up out of the ...”

“... sinfulness, until Jesus finally shows mercy and lets her in. In Fables, Ancient and Modern (1700), John Dryden rendered ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’ in contemporary English, ‘not daring … to adventure on her prologue, because ’tis too licentious’. Voltaire took the opposite approach: when he reworked Dryden’s version in the 1760s, he made it even ...”

“... well have learned the basics of the art from the recycled works of that universal publisher, Dr John Trusler (d. 1820): ‘Be not dark or mysterious; Affect not absence of mind; Punch no one in conversation; Hold no one by the button; Spit not on the carpet; Dare to be prudish; Avoid mauvaise honte.’ (‘What’s mauvaise honte, Mamma?’ – ‘Oh, ask ...”

“... like Beaverbrook who ‘failed to secure the re-election of Churchill in 1945’. The entry on John Masefield strikes a new note. ‘In “Sea Fever” he wrote: “I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gipsy life,” but, in fact, he had settled in London, and in 1907 began to work on the Manchester Guardian.’ Naturally one turns to Yeats to ...”

“... This history of the Tower Menagerie, founded 1235, begins on a winter day in 1764, when John Wesley, aged 61, arrived at the Tower with a flute-playing companion, to conduct what he called ‘an odd experiment’. The idea was to observe how the lions reacted to music, which might give some indication as to whether animals possessed souls. Descartes ...”

“... long afterwards the producer died suddenly and that was that. The scarlet Woolsack, described by John Wells as ‘a sofa sacred to the law’, plays a sit-on part throughout this book. Though periodically restuffed with Commonwealth wool, it retains all the ‘ritual magic’ of medieval days. During the Gordon Riots of 1780 it was the holy refuge on which ...”

“... Forest with a guest appearance by Sterne, Constable’s Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows, a John Martin and a Turner, with snatches of poems by Wordsworth and Coleridge, and echoes of De Quincey, Shelley, Frankenstein (not sure about that); and then on to Samuel Palmer to Wuthering Heights to Ford Madox Brown to ...”

“... he might be the author of books on dynamic thinking: he was a 19th-century French philosopher. John Lancaster Spalding, with 52 entries, turns out to have been a 19th-century bishop of Peoria. Even some of the British names are none too familiar. Sir Arthur Helps, with 33 extracts from Essays Written in the intervals of Business, was – but, of course ...”

“... us of the aphrodisiac reputation of turnips, carrots and onions: in contrast to lettuce which, as John Evelyn believed, upheld chastity, though possibly not in rabbits. The vegetable revolution was assisted by the post-war travel boom which enabled housewives to see what was cooking in the vegetable pots of Europe. But, if Mrs Grigson is right, it is the ...”

“... the ‘gunpowder plot’ and literary impostor (a category not yet extinct). In the latest volume John Stone-house appears as politician and confidence trickster, but Harold Philby is dubbed Soviet agent rather than traitor and Klaus Fuchs gets by as theoretical physicist. Other less controversial occupations include entrepreneur, man of letters, geologist ...”

“... permission to use the runnels and platforms for The Vertical Line, a performance piece devised by John Berger. In Ways of Seeing, Berger presented on television for the first time an ideological analysis of art and aesthetics. One of the programmes juxtaposed pin-ups and centrefolds with Titians, in a powerful early assault on advertising. Thirty years ...”

“... facilely grouped as a cetacean school of Great White Males (Styron, Norman Mailer, James Jones, John Updike, Saul Bellow, Gore Vidal, J.D. Salinger, Joseph Heller, the recently retired Philip Roth), whose ghostly father and bearded Neptune disturbing the liquor cabinet deep into the night was Ernest Hemingway. Even those least influenced by Hemingway’s ...”