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“... aberration in a general history of decency and good will. By contrast, I felt that Pope John Paul was the champion of the faith itself, the very faith which David Willey professes to believe, and that without such tactics as the Pope’s it is hard to see how Roman Catholicism can retain any plausible hold on its adherents. Take as an example the attacks ...”

“... for their arcane habits of mind and their usually enraptured view of the mediocre and obscure. Paul Henry Lang – doyen of American musicology and the author of the magisterial Music in Western Civilisation – was never slow to point this out: ‘A scholar who, like a Hindu ascetic immersed in self-contemplation, confines himself to his narrow field of ...”

“... to find herself in control. Venus seems to invite more perverse and dangerous adventures. Randy Newman has a song that begins: ‘Baby take off your coat real slow.’ The verse ends (shoes and dress gone) with a three-line refrain: You can leave your hat on You can leave your hat on You can leave your hat on That is what Venus has done in Cupid ...”

“... with one of the other tutors. Sometimes there would be a further passenger, a student called Colin Newman. As they drove, the three of them would talk, and Newman’s sense of himself was gradually transformed: ‘I was no longer just a rather poor student but a friend and an equal – an artist sitting in a car with other ...”

“... exists or takes place, in the world, in the mind. ‘Whatever happens, happens,’ as Jane Newman, the translator of Time, History and Literature shrewdly renders a difficult German phrase. In a second sense it is whatever piece of the actual or lived, the experienced or the deeply needed, that a writer or thinker has found words for, or a painter ...”

“... Christian imagination? Is there nothing to gather but other men’s flowers? The writings of J.H. Newman shine out through Cowling’s pages, and so indeed do those of H.G. Wells: Cowling is at pains to report the enemy fairly. But the author himself is a humble presence in the shadows. Cowling’s book leaves me more than ever convinced that all beliefs are ...”

“... expert in the gentle art of painless extraction’, who had supplied him with information. Bernard Newman, a spy novelist who worked in counter-espionage during the war, told of organising a ‘series of listening posts in the Amiens brothels’ in 1917 through a prostitute called Regina, whose talents included being able to blink messages in Morse code. The ...”

“... More (‘Morus, humble and witty at the end’) and ‘the English Church,/the Church of Wesley, Newman, and George Bell’. Those last names, ‘Wesley, Newman, and George Bell’, incompatible figures who comprise several different English churches, alert us to a certain strain in the way Hill gathers and transmits his ...”

“... narrow, secret alleys, twittens everybody knows, the relief of that, the pub, the slope down into Newman Passage, the opening sequence of Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, a puddle of bloody neon, awkward stone setts, smokers in doorways; and then out, immediately, into another world, Newman Street. Black ...”

“... reached by Canada, New Zealand and parts of the US. It was also the former Prime Minister, Paul Keating’s finest moment. He had invested extraordinary persistence, energy and passion into the attainment of Mabo. The opponents of Mabo were powerful; they were complacent and repressive, and it was great fun to see them affronted. The sight of ...”

“... output at a stroke. But in another way, it does remarkably little to change the sense one has of Paul Muldoon. It is a book for initiates, more of the same. Each of his previous five volumes has ended with something a little longer, a relaxing gallop after the dressage – even ‘The Year of the Sloes, for Ishi’ in New Weather (1973) was four pages ...”

“... cast-list, but in The Rotters’ Club, the characters include a Colin, a Sheila, a Benjamin, a Paul and a Lois Trotter, a Bill; an Irene and Doug Anderton; Barbara, Sam and Philip Chase, Malcolm, Roy Slater, Sean Harding, Steve Richards, Culpepper, Cicely Boyd, Donald, Claire and Miriam Newman, and Mr Plumb. And these ...”

“... turned out to be so strangely decisive, the most illuminating book I have read is Gerald Newman’s The Rise of English Nationalism. As many others have done, Newman describes how English patriotism arose from below during the 18th century and was directed specifically against France and Frenchness, but he lays ...”

“... said, his greatness and his doom indistinguishable. It reads more like art than life, but then as Paul Delany reminded us in a recent article in this journal (24 January), life ‘too is “written” – shaped, selected, mythologised – by the same rules that govern the creation of literary texts’. Here, each of the countless fragments of memory out of ...”

“... perhaps unsurprisingly, often took a more positive line (think of Florence’s tender love for Paul Dombey). The tough-minded novelist Elizabeth Missing Sewell, a contemporary of Eliot, repeatedly warned women about renouncing autonomy in order to dedicate themselves to a brother’s welfare. Her youth had been dominated by the demands of her numerous and ...”