“... long black bastard’, ‘It’s a grand class of a day,’ ‘He was like a shook fox,’ ‘trying to keep the chat from going dark’, ‘a lock of food’: such phrases are as foreign to English ears as Healy’s writing is remote from the English novel of suburban adultery. ‘She was like the hare, enchanted,’ Joejoe says of a former ...”

“... simply make[s] one sit still in an apathy, and watch the clock spinning backwards’. For Henry James, the war seemed ‘to undo everything’: ‘My sense of what is generally happening all about us here is only unutterable,’ he confessed to Brander Matthews. The country house, that central prop of the idyllic British afternoon, figured prominently in ...”

“... some of them much more obscure than these, are not. Consequently the reader’s share, as Henry James called it, is quite half; or, to put it another way, unless you are a polymathic historian with some knowledge of literature you will need to do quite a lot of research to figure out what Paulin is doing. This is not a complaint; we are dealing with a ...”

“... The implicit refrain which underlies many of the chapters of Paradigms Lost is that OK, their fox has been shot, but it was never entirely their fox anyway, and there are, in any case, many other good animals out in the forest and, taking one thing with another, all you need do is fine-tune the rhetoric and carry on ...”

“... he doesn’t have to call the Congress, he doesn’t have to check with the courts. Dick Cheney, Fox News 21 December 2008 In passing the 1946 Atomic Energy Act, Congress granted the president unsupervised authority over the bomb, ‘for such use as he deems necessary in the interest of national defence’. The ‘nature of the presidency,’ Garry Wills ...”

“... that had somehow escaped damage. It was from one of these balconies that Jackie, Philby’s pet fox, fell to its death. He suspected the housekeeper of pushing it off the ledge: she was known to dislike it. For a man who betrayed scores of agents to be tortured and executed, Philby was remarkably sentimental about animals. Eleanor said that after Jackie’s ...”

“... It was​ in a Quonset hut south of the Potomac that Peter Matthiessen met James Jesus Angleton, ‘a cadaverous, hawk-boned man with dark hair, large elfin ears and a lively intelligent face behind horn-rimmed glasses’, as Matthiessen later described him in an unpublished account of his recruitment to the CIA in the autumn of 1950 ...”

“... it ‘rather dreary’. The following year, when Another Country appeared, he made his position on James Baldwin clear: ‘I loathe Jimmy’s fiction: it is crudely written and of a balls-aching boredom.’ In 1960 he found something he did like. He announced to David Selznick that ‘a delightful book’ called To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee was ‘going ...”

“... in the Bank of England. The family was originally a Huguenot one from Normandy. Walter’s father James married twice. The first marriage was childless, the second made ten years after his wife’s death to Lucy Browning, who was 26 years his junior. The family lived first at a modest house in Charlton, later in a more substantial one in the more convenient ...”

“... had been like. I said I wanted to go up to the Fairy Ring. For I’d had the fairy stories of James Hogg the Ettrick Shepherd read to me and he’d written of this wood, where it was dangerous to go most of the time, and especially to the Fairy Ring. The toadstools, a pale, hideous necklace of poison round the thick, mossy neck of the Ring, had been ...”

“... domini regis. What did they pay Chaucer for? Why was he so useful? Is there any clue to his James Bond activities in his poetry? At any rate it is a pleasure to have a literary subject who appears to have been taken seriously in his own lifetime, to have had a role in the great world. No wonder, then, that Chaucer’s biographers have been so ready to ...”

“... and as a flavouring but also for dyeing lace gold, which was much in vogue in the court of James I. Among the figures tramping the roads were the ‘simplers’, sellers of herbs for cooking and strewing. Mary Leech and Judith Vardey, mentioned in the records of the Fleet Market in the 1730s, sold ‘Phisick Herbs’ such as mugwort for ‘women’s ...”

“... pencil. As late as 1771, at the beginning of the decade of Smith’s Wealth of Nations and of James Watt’s steam engine, the Encyclopaedia Britannica could still define pencils, not as lead pencils with points, but as brushes of hair or bristles used by artists to lay on colours, and could list the materials employed in their making as ...”

“... that she became the hostess of a London literary salon frequented by Kipling and Henry James. Hers was a success story, but one wonders whether her other productions are so riddled as this one with hidden fears and desires. The rare achievement is the identification with both sides: the mother’s urge to be free from the exasperating cares of a ...”

“... than in those of any contemporary. They also offer, as is well known, even more about hunting (of fox, hare and stag), and a very great deal, less famously, about dress, especially male dress. Norman Gash refrains from discussing the hunting passages as social history, except in certain incidental respects, and deals only selectively with the really ...”