“... office, the banks and the castle, and to issue a demand that George III dismiss the government of William Pitt and make peace with the French Republic. Just before the arrests, an English medical student studying in Edinburgh, John Edmonds Stock, had been sent down to London by Watt with a letter to the London Corresponding Society inviting them to mount a ...”

“... assigned to the ‘hedge fund overlord’, the ‘polo-playing playboy millionaire’, the ‘James Bond of the Russian oligarchy’, the ‘French luxury goods tycoon’ (also appearing as the ‘French luxury titan’), the ‘serial dater of supermodels’, and the ‘leveraged-buyout king’. The book is illustrated with photographs of de Pury’s ...”

“... other casualties’, in her gloomy list. Anne Jessop Beechey, the second wife of the portraitist William Beechey, began to show miniatures a year into their marriage in 1795. ‘She proposed it as a resource in case of any accident happening to him,’ Farington reported in his diary. ‘They have Six children.’ The painter Amelia Noel, soliciting ...”

“... of age in the 1930s and 1940s and included Richard Wright (born 1908), Ralph Ellison (1914) and James Baldwin (1924), Himes has never quite entered the pantheon. His peers were condescending: Wright never took him seriously as an artist; Ellison, who saw him as little more than an ex-con with a pen, joked that Himes must have been the model for Bigger ...”

“... isn’t like that,’ they’re off the hook. 20 February. We’re gradually assembling a class: James Corden, who’s plump and funny and at the audition entirely takes charge; Sacha Dhawan, an Asian boy from Manchester who complains that all he’s ever offered these days are Muslim terrorists or Afghan refugees; Jamie Parker, who is to play Scripps the ...”

“... of sand and debris which had been moved that morning, but found nothing. Superintendent Frank James led the operation, and it was one that grew bigger by the hour. One of the empty houses in the street, just 200 yards from Sandy’s home, was set up as the police headquarters, and volunteers supplied tea and things from there to the police and the ...”

“... almost everyone had access to a radio, though not in the gentlemen’s clubs of Pall Mall and St James, where they were banned, or in the Palace of Westminster, where MPs needed to gather around an MP’s car parked outside if they wanted to hear a horse race or a cup tie. Under the Presbyterian influence of its first director general, Lord Reith, until 1938 ...”

“... literature’ and to modernism in particular presents problems. It is as easy to feel that James and Wells are incompatible as it is to reject the notion that Dostoevsky (let alone Oedipus Rex) has any family relationship with the detective story. When we come to Orlando or Pynchon, the conviction of incompatibility remains firm, but the arguments ...”

“... shot Liberty Valance was not the man who shot Liberty Valance; or, to put that another way, where James Stewart got all the credit for killing Lee Marvin (the villain again), leaving John Wayne with the actual dirty hands. ‘Print the legend,’ is what the newspaperman says when he’s told the full story. But then, is the deed dirty? Do we object morally ...”

“... Mead seems not to have anticipated the sensation her research would generate. Her publisher, William Morrow, knew better. He asked Mead to add a more explicit chapter on the way her study related to Americans, and printed Coming of Age in Samoa with an image on the cover of a young island couple making for the bushes. But the thrust of the book was lost ...”

“... of reading the memoir of his friend Christopher Buckley, son of the conservative commentator William Buckley. Hitchens discovers a line he particularly likes, about ‘bringing to life a circuit that will spare the republic’, but is horrified to realise that it comes from the address of his arch-nemesis, Henry Kissinger, at Buckley’s memorial ...”

“... was stalled, too, on the technological frontier that had opened up just across the North Sea, with James Watt’s 1769 patent of the separate-condensing steam engine. Holland had extensive peat deposits, good enough to distil gin (more glow per guilder, less bulky than beer) but not to smelt steel or to drive ships, and little in the way of coal. In 1596 ...”

“... Beginner, published in 1966, about living in Cairo as a child between the wars: her father, Sir William Goodenough Hayter, was a judge with the Anglo-Egyptian Service, a vital arm of the British Protectorate running the country from the wings. There were many prints of Egypt in our Zamalek flat – picturesque views of the ruins and the pyramids and Old ...”

“... didn’t take long for him to become spectacularly successful. In 1953, he starred on Broadway in William Inge’s Picnic, in which he was ‘stiff and wooden but an actor’, according to the film director Sidney Lumet. John Foreman told Stern that every studio wanted him after that, and he officially became the ‘hot guy’. Over the next few years he just ...”

“... expected to provide some co-ordinates. Yet even among modern masters there is little consistency. James died in his early seventies, Musil in his early sixties: Leon Edel and Karl Corino awarded them each two thousand pages. Kafka, who barely reached the age of forty, yielded only five hundred fewer from Reiner Stach. Proust, expiring at 51, got just under a ...”