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“... a way with titles (which have got better still over the years). During the Seventies MacSweeney took his poems on the run, publishing a fugitive series of pamphlets from Blacksuede Boot Press, but his Odes from Trigram in 1978 were a new and estranging poetry, which called for very adroit reading. Ranter, a sequence from 1985, created another ...”

“... Church of the Latin Rite, not least that section which remained loyal to the bishop of Rome. John O’Malley illustrates the room in his superb new history of the Council of Trent: the nave of the church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Trent, a bishopric in the foothills of the Dolomites. In that grand setting, seated on an amphitheatre specially erected for ...”

“... peace with one another, and will not for a different faith or a change of churches shed blood. It took the rest of Europe a century and more to learn that lesson, and Anjou himself, as King Henri III of France, would be stabbed to death by a religious fanatic – as it happens, a Catholic. But it would have been misleading to have left the story in 1573 (let ...”

“... of them are plotting murder. Nutshell-Hamlet’s father is a poet and publisher of poets called John Cairncross, living away from the marital home in hopes of a reconciliation with Trudy, though all he achieves is easier access to her bed for his rival. (The surname has a noble ring, though it is made up of two things that can mark a grave.) The house is a ...”

“... is imprisoned largely because of love-complications (the same applies to McCarthy’s young John Grady Cole). Tortured, immured, separated from his beloved, Habrokomes is given the relief of a dream: he thought he saw his own father Lykomedes in black clothing travelling across all the lands and seas and arriving finally at his prison where he ...”

“... John Bayley’s new novel is largely about those who are had on, or taken in, and this may well include his readers, who need to keep their wits about them. To begin with, he conjures up a couple of innocents. There was an innocent, too, as hero in his last novel, In Another Country, published in 1955. But Oliver, a young officer with the British army of occupation, was a worrier and a sensitive, risking trouble for the sake of his German girlfriend, and contrasted with his hideously successful rival ...”

“... one in the morning. I realised what I’d done as soon as I had paid, yelled as the taxi sped off, took others to go to police stations, went to the lost-and-found bureau over the river in case it was open while my contemporaries were dancing the Wedding Samba at the Four Hundred, went back to the lost-and-found the moment it opened the next morning, and the ...”

“... of the advantages of those innocent days over our own was that wars lasted less long than it took to get to them), since he made his living as a war reporter. But what about Whistler’s fervent support of the Boers against the British because his work had been so admired in Holland and slighted in England? When the Great War broke out, the patter of ...”

“... bipolar Kulturkampf, it did leak out to a wide public through the fictions of Len Deighton and John Le Carré. Watching the shadow-play on the walls of the Cold War cave, and seeing the literal interpenetration of opposites as Karla penetrated ‘us’, and ‘we’ reciprocated, one could make the induction that the spy game was a thing in itself, and ...”

“... is after the crucifixion, when she stands at the foot of the cross with the Virgin Mary and John the Evangelist, and then goes to the tomb with embalming oils to care for Jesus’s body. In the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke there are several women involved, and they find the tomb empty except for an angel (sometimes two), with ‘a face like ...”

“... press yard in the presence of their friends and relations, climbed into a horse-drawn cart that took them on the three-mile journey to the gallows. The route to Tyburn Tree snaked through Holborn and St Giles, then went along Tyburn Road, today’s Oxford Street. It was dense with spectators. At Tyburn itself, a hundred thousand people might be in ...”

“... as mime artists must. And they remain so. By Canto xxv, in the Heaven of the Fixed Stars, where John the Evangelist explains the disembodied nature of beings in Paradise, there is no doubt that Beatrice is a very material girl, her right leg bent, and forward just a touch, her left leg braced under a sidling hip.The celebrity appearances by Adam and Saints ...”

“... was light. And God said “Er – could I just see the darkness again?”’ If this is not Pope John Paul II’s kind of God, it’s as much because of the hesitancy as the gender. If he were ever in two minds on a subject, both of them would be infallible. Not for nothing was the priest who taught him theology in Rome known as ‘The Rigid’. As a Polish ...”

“... It was not a pilgrimage that took us to Bishop’s Stortford, but simply a search for lunch. Once in the little town, however, we were reminded of what we had known and then forgotten: that it was the birthplace of Cecil John Rhodes. Moreover, we were told that the house in which Rhodes was born had been turned into a museum ...”

“... the exhibition by Hermione Hobhouse, and a first-class biography by Robert Rhodes James.* Albert took a long time to receive his deserts. Indeed I doubt whether he was fully appreciated during his lifetime. He was a foreigner. He disliked the rigmarole of court life and he was altogether too clever. The Great Exhibition of 1851, housed in the Crystal ...”