“... less likely than Faulkner’s to be snatched into a metaphysical empyrean. She doesn’t, as Henry James would say, ‘cultivate the high pitch and beat the big drum’. What interests her is not so much their existential dilemmas as their physical and moral landscape, the enclosing objects, in which she allows herself virtually to disappear: their domestic ...”

“... of exploration and scientific achievement in England between two celebrated voyages, Captain James Cook’s first circumnavigation of the world in the Endeavour in the late 1760s and Charles Darwin’s expedition to the Galapagos in the 1830s. William and Caroline Herschel’s advances in astronomy and Humphry Davy’s in chemistry dominate both ...”

“... really go to sea until he was nearly 16, and then he spent his early days as a midshipman in the Hunter, a humble ten-gun pink, rather than in a rated ship, where he would have had many companions of the more conventional naval type who, at a formative age, might have taught him more about their language and ways than ever he learnt. It is true that he moved ...”

“... business, with much to reveal waywardly, not only about the quarry, the word, but also about the hunter, the etymologist, now expertly tracking, now brought to the blind check of an ‘etym.dub.’, the wild cast of a ‘perh.’, the resignation of a ‘prob.imit.’ when the scent goes cold. The hardest words to run down seem to be those of the ...”

“... World War’), F.H. Hinsley (... and the Use of Special Intelligence), R.V. Jones, the happy beam-hunter of 1940 and premier intelligencer thereafter (... and Science), Norman Rose (and Zionism) and Roy Jenkins (the Government of 1951-55) are predictably good. The uneven John Keegan (... ’s Strategy), though seemingly disqualified by his recent published ...”

“... in Hoover’s approach. Even Senator Karl Mundt, a dinosaur Republican and tireless witch-hunter, could no longer live with his public endorsement of Hoover and privily told his aide Henry Eakins that ‘Hoover is the most dangerous man in the United States. He has misused his office. There are things I know that Hoover has done to Congressmen and ...”

“... yellow-haired blonde’ who presides over the ticket cage at a Bowery cinema, and the Rev. Mr James Jefferson Davis Hall, ‘the greatest and most frightening street preacher in the city’. There is the founder of Captain Charley’s Private Museum for Intelligent People, where the exhibits include Theodore Roosevelt’s pith helmet and a parasol said to ...”

“... Put a 20-dollar gold piece on my watch-chain So the boys will know I died standing pat. ‘Saint James Infirmary’ A few years ago I was looking at a group of paintings by Poussin in which Death dances to a stately tune, though always with Panic as part of the line-up, and began to realise that the basic beat of the tune – the paintings’ processional ...”

“... the limitations of pure abstraction. A third text, The Perception of the Visual World (1950) by James J. Gibson, ‘a study of how motion affects a viewer in a three-dimensional space’, also played an important role in his art-making (Duchamp was interested in such questions too). During this period Hamilton spent many hours on the train from London to ...”

“... and film, the removal isn’t easy. Heller-Roazen can’t resist another reference to Kafka, whose Hunter Gracchus is a paragon of the undead. ‘Forever on the great stairway’ to the other world, he tells us (in an appropriately mixed metaphor), ‘my death boat went off course,’ returning him again and again to Riva on Lake Garda (where Kafka vacationed ...”

“... their real estate business going during the Depression. Despite this, Lorde was accepted to Hunter College High School, a competitive, fully-funded institution for ‘intellectually gifted young ladies’. Again, most of her peers were white, but Lorde made lifelong friends among the other ‘outsiders’, including Diane di Prima, who shared her love ...”

“... of the social sciences have the confidence to invoke the ideals of Herbert Spencer and Henry James simultaneously. In his second volume, Runciman proceeds to his own substantive social theory. He remarks at the outset that he will here be concerned only with the explanatory segment of his overall prescriptions. But this involves no shrinkage of horizon ...”

“... and in another language; many émigrés or refugees or transplanted folk (‘homeloose’ in James Wood’s coinage) end up with a rusty, old-fashioned command of their language of origin and an imperfect mastery of the newly acquired tongue. There are a few exceptions, but it is more usual to have one language for the library and another for the bedroom ...”

“... the travelling roadshow organised by Shaftesbury and Buckingham around the King’s bastard son, James, Duke of Monmouth, was playing to rapturous crowds. Activists among the country gentry, incensed by the long prorogation of Parliament in 1675, and by then convinced that Charles II would never accept Parliament as a partner in government, had for some ...”

“... socialist candidate for the presidency. Still, as Barthes said of his meal with Giscard, ‘a myth hunter … must hunt everywhere.’ That lunch, which took place in a flat in the Marais on 25 February 1980, with Lang doing the cooking, apparently went quite well. But then Barthes, en route back to his office, walked into the path of a laundry van, which left ...”