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“... Fascinating, too, at the onset of the witchcraft craze, to find a little-known Nominalist, Martin Plantsch, marshalling arguments which ought to have nipped it in the bud and saved countless women from torture. Plantsch denied that hosts or holy water had real powers that witches could exploit for devilish purposes. Luther’s lack of iconoclastic zeal ...”

“... Question does engage the attention of novelists, they approach it with glancing allusiveness, like Martin Amis, or cover it with the cloak of magical realism, which, whatever its dubious imaginative benefits, weakens any intended social point. So it is no surprise that Stuart Hood and Michael Dibdin concern themselves with the present state of society and ...”

“... The death of Dennis Potter may have been authored by God, but it was adapted for television by Potter himself. It began after a brief report in the Guardian suggested that Potter’s terminal cancer related to his lifelong addiction to nicotine. By return there was a gleeful letter from Potter revelling in the Potteresque fact that far from his ‘beloved cigarettes’ being the culprits, his forthcoming death from pancreatic cancer was probably iatrogenic: the result of years of lethal medication ...”

“... in the museum of the past. So many Victorian things do; it seems a feature of that epoch. R.B. Martin’s skills as a biographer, already manifest in his detailed and persuasive studies of Tennyson, FitzGerald and Charles Kingsley, are at their best in that rich Victorian ambience where religion, art and sex mingled in an unself-conscious totality. He ...”

“... of Olympic protocol, only the US National Anthem was sung to open the games. Only Americans – Dennis Mitchell after winning a 100-metres heat and Michael Johnson after taking the 200-metre gold – puffed out their chests and pulled their jerseys to display the national emblem. Only Americans accused an Irish swimmer of using drugs when she won the ...”

“... their oinkers joggling. It’s the fashion.’ Oinkers are, in my view, clunkers. The situation of Dennis Potter’s Ticket to Ride (like the title) has a slightly used feel to it. A man comes to consciousness on an Inter-City train. He has no memory, and no clues to his identity on his person. ‘I? Who is I?’ he asks himself. On arrival at Paddington the ...”

“... It’s Only Ray Parlour (Arsenal midfielder, 1992-2004); Stillness and Speed: My Story by Dennis Bergkamp (Arsenal striker, 1995-2006); Addicted by Tony Adams (Arsenal centre-back, 1983-2002); and, now, Arsène Wenger’s My Life in Red and White. Arsène Wenger on the touchline at the Emirates Stadium, 29 March 2014. The Premier League has come ...”

“... Shaw, which are good theatre,’ and which could have been used instead. The head of radio drama, Martin Esslin – not an English name, she observed – replied to Whitehouse that the play was simply a comedy about a steam engine enthusiast who wanted to turn an old mill into a steam engine museum (radio drama was evidently as compelling then as it is ...”

“... who does use them is almost certain not to get a high-level government position. But Admiral Dennis Blair, the new director of national intelligence, greatly admires Freeman: just the sort of person, he thought, to revitalise the intelligence community, which had been very politicised in the Bush years. Predictably alarmed, the Israel lobby launched a ...”

“... public park in Beijing to be closed so that she and her Gang could use it as a private estate. Dennis Bloodworth’s truly magisterial biography of Mao concludes that, for all his faults and mistakes, he was a founding emperor comparable to Quin Shi Huangdi or to Liu Bang of the Han Dynasty: ‘He was the right man at the right moment. A flawed giant, the ...”

“... by education (King’s College, Canterbury), and Certainly not mediocre. But neither were Dennis Compton, Freddy Trueman or Ian Botham, or indeed Graham Gooch, and they were (are) all very much Players. In his autobiography, breezily ghost-written by Martin Johnson, the joker of the Independent’s back page, Gower ...”

“... Graham’s ‘smirk’. A dapper dresser, Graham ‘usually reeked of Paco Rabane aftershave, as Martin Hayes always pointed out to us’. What the reader wants to know, of course, is whether Graham could have done anything about Adams’s drinking. He asks himself this question directly. The answer is somewhat ambiguous. ‘Who knows. Perhaps there were ...”

“... is the magazine whose identity was moulded during the Thirties, under the editorship of Kingsley Martin and after the merger with the Nation. Yet the New Statesman had almost two decades of existence before that, under an editor whose length of tenure has been exceeded only by Martin’s. A handful of disconnected facts ...”

“... of raising the standards. But the sternest indictment is of the press. Parts of this chapter by Martin Harrop are very funny – I particularly relished the tabulation of headlines which shows, for instance, the Telegraph’s ‘Labour’s £11bn manifesto’ against the Mirror’s ‘Paras’ Gang-Bang’, or the Times’s ‘Tory and Labour worry about ...”

“... and so on. Then there come in turn Look back in anger, the ‘smart playfulness’ of Nigel Dennis, later developed by Orton and Stoppard, cultural despair variously expressed – for instance, by Herbert Read and Kingsley Amis; and then to the sorts of things about which Appleyard enjoys talking, such as Brutalism and Pop Art. He does not neglect ...”