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“... Christ) and added, in his Journals, that it was ‘quite literally lunacy’ to try to become one. Richard Swinburne’s book demonstrates the dangers of speaking about God rationally, or of arming him pragmatically. Swinburne is a theist. He hardly mentions Jesus, who is little more than a topcoat to keep the believer morally warm. Swinburne, who teaches the ...”

“... of Robert Browning’s Dramatis Personae. The author of Andrea del Sarto would have found in Richard Strauss a subject ideally suited to his imaginative powers. He would have cast the composer, not, I think, in his early years, but towards the end of his life: in 1940, perhaps, in late summer. The scene: Strauss’s tastefully furnished study in his ...”

“... unionists and Italian Marxists were forever dropping in on his house in Spitalfields, which Stuart Hall recalled as a ‘sort of permanently open unofficial conference centre with some informal seminar always in permanent session in the kitchen’. In 1967, Samuel founded the History Workshop movement to democratise ‘the act of historical ...”

“... and too nobbly for a girl’s. He/she has also attracted the attention of someone in the snooker hall above the pub and there’s a lot of shouting. Later, as we are getting into the car, Gary, a young man crippled with arthritis, calls out to A. from the snooker hall. She knows him and asks if it was him that was doing ...”

“... of seriousness. It has been raised from the level of nostalgia and trivia by four new biographies: Richard Koszarski’s Erich von Stroheim, Roger Icart’s Abel Gance (in French – still searching for an English publisher), Richard Schickel’s D. W. Griffith and now David Robinson’s Chaplin. All have one vital quality ...”

“... suggest such a thing?) However, there is a certain family resemblance between the languid village hall in Florida designed by Krier and the replanned Italian town of Alessandria also featured in his book. ‘Modern is chronology, while modernist is ideology,’ Krier points out, to demonstrate that he isn’t a hopeless reactionary; he is perfectly ready to ...”

“... very much older before I gathered that there was something not quite right about T.E. Lawrence. Richard Aldington’s Lawrence of Arabia: A Biographical Enquiry, which came out in 1955, denounced its subject as a bastard (literally), a liar, a charlatan and a pervert. It also disparaged the importance and the achievements of the Arab revolt, mocked ...”

“... The Saatchi Gallery, now to be found in the old County Hall building, spreads itself down long corridors and through ranks of offices. Many of these contain single works. Only in the big rotunda are a substantial number of pieces seen together – among them Damien Hirst’s very large anatomical model and Ron Mueck’s very small sculpture Dead Dad ...”

“... is social, not scholarly. Not that these categories can confidently be thought distinct. When Richard Wollheim and I agreed to do a double act at a lunchtime university seminar we were surprised to find that a very large number of people had turned up with their sandwiches: but they hadn’t come just for the company, and there were plenty of acute ...”

“... Both these books sport impressive supporting casts, which run into the glittering hundreds. Sir Richard Attenborough is the common factor. Bergen was his co-star in a film called The Sand Pebbles, shot on location in the Far East. Out of hours, while the other actors, Steve McQueen amongst them, were busy getting drunk and chasing women, Dickie (bless ...”

“... current position in 1675. Originally it stood in the Roehampton garden of Charles’s treasurer, Richard Weston. During the Civil War it was buried beneath a sympathetic metalsmith’s flowerbeds. Blind to the decapitation of its flesh-and-blood original in 1649, it was brought back into the light only after the Restoration. By the time it was set up at ...”

“... He died, in fact, while on a final lecture tour in England, collapsing after a reading in St James Hall in March 1870. Nor is Conrad any less misleading about Dickens’s first trip to America. Having served up some ersatz fare about American Notes (‘in Dickens’s nightmarish America, there is emptiness: panic has driven away even the houses’ – whatever ...”

“... regular army. The part the SA played in Hitler’s failed attempt to seize power in the ‘beer-hall putsch’ of November 1923 was an important part of its self-image in subsequent years. Hitler went to prison for leading the putsch, and the period following his release in 1924 was pivotal. Believing that Röhm’s continued advocacy of the violent seizure ...”

“... Promenade Concerts were founded towards the close of the 19th century, shortly after the Queen’s Hall opened as a new musical venue in 1893. As such, they may be regarded as a classic instance of what is sometimes called ‘invented tradition’, where venerable antiquity is less in evidence than is often popularly supposed; and where change and adaptation ...”

“... were probably right, and I was halfway out the door anyway, the living room door, leading to the hall and all it contains. Some of the best poems here are uncharacteristically straightforward, telling little stories or developing a single idea in the vein of ‘Myrtle’ from And the Stars Were Shining (1994), which begins, ‘How funny your name would ...”