“... In the autumn​ of 1994, Jim Grant, a technical director at Granada Television, went to the Arndale Centre in Manchester and bought three A4 pads and a pencil. He was nearly forty and about to lose his job thanks to corporate restructuring, which he’d spent two years fighting as a union shop steward. His plan was to make a living as a novelist, and he set to work on a thriller, using as his models Alistair MacLean and the Travis McGee series by John MacDonald, which focuses on a happy-go-lucky investigator with a romantic code of honour ...”

“... women who had escaped from their owners in London, only to be recaptured, came to public attention.James Somerset, who had been brought to England from Virginia by his owner, Charles Stewart, and managed to escape and live freely for a brief period, became the subject of a test case in 1772. Was the ownership of people legal in the ‘mother ...”

“... as John Quincy Adams described it in 1823. In imitation of British freelance imperialists such as James Brooke, the ‘white rajah’ who ruled the state of Sarawak on Borneo as a private fiefdom in the mid-19th century, America produced its own brand of freebooters, including William Walker, the Tennessee doctor who conquered and ruled Nicaragua for ten ...”

“... of election to the House of Representatives on the Whig ticket, the timing was dreadful. President James K. Polk, a Democrat, had just declared war on Mexico. Along with many other Whigs, Lincoln denounced Polk, incurring the charge of disloyalty to the troops. Then the Whig Party confirmed its meretriciousness by nominating Zachary Taylor, a returning ...”

“... two decades on topics such as Dryden’s triplets, Shakespeare and anagrams, T.S. Eliot, Henry James, Byron, Norman Mailer, Ion Bugan, Samuel Beckett, Geoffrey Hill, and what Ricks argues is the non-distinction between poetry and prose. ‘Any claim to coherence has to be a mild one,’ Ricks says of the volume, since the two subjects, heroism and the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... too glad to avoid vengeance from his fellows by impersonating the great in perpetual concealment; James Pool and Suzanne Pool’s Who financed Hitler?, which opens with a luxurious gathering of bankers and party ‘higher-ups’ with their sleek women, just a shade less exotic than the gathering in a Japanese restaurant of Spanish-speaking kameraden that ...”

“... secret programme was placed under the guidance of two former instructors in resistance to torture, James E. Mitchell and Bruce Jessen. Like the agents they supervised, Mitchell and Jessen are protected by pseudonyms, but earlier reporting in their case has made it possible to penetrate the disguise. Their strategy was to ‘reverse engineer’ the pedagogic ...”

“... made in this way, sometimes to good effect. Among the last, now more than half a century ago, were James Reid QC, a Scottish Tory MP who, as Lord Reid, became one of the best judges of the postwar years, and Cyril Radcliffe QC, a distinguished public servant and barrister. The legislation which in 2009 took final appeal in the UK out of the legislature and ...”

“... pages of a book. All his life he was desperately concerned about appearances. He fired the poet James Thomson from the paper he edited for drunkenness (‘The City of Dreadful Night’ first appeared in Bradlaugh’s National Reformer). And though he was more or less in love with his long-time collaborator Annie Besant (and she desperately so with ...”

“... and a commercial artist. Having completed his national service in the RAF he used his demob grant to study at St Martin’s School of Art, going on to the Royal College of Art on a scholarship. After working in the kitchen at the newly opened Royal Festival Hall in 1951 – he’d begun by mopping floors but was soon roped into skinning a heap of sole ...”

“... rumour, handed down by the primary witnesses: his siblings Laurence and Kate, his publisher Grant Richards, the small group of Cambridge initiates. Auden called Housman one of the classic case-histories, and most accounts of his life have a spurious smoothness about them, as if the teller were at the helm. A biographer can but do as Housman exhorts in ...”

“... that were ‘built to envious show’ amidst the riot of competitive expenditure in the reign of James I. The Sidneys never had the money to spoil their inheritance, which survives as a glorious muddle of a house, centred on an enchanting Medieval hall and sprawling out into its Renaissance and later additions. Jonson’s poem makes virtues of the family’s ...”

“... after Locke, the idea that philosophy is about a set of ‘problems’. Around 1910 William James, G.E. Moore and Bertrand Russell each wrote texts entitled, with minor variants, ‘The Problems of Philosophy’. That way of seeing philosophy has stuck. But arguably it was Locke who made it possible to see philosophy as problems in the first ...”

“... in the tradition of long, narrative colonial histories stretching back to Elphinstone, Malcolm, Grant Duff and James Mill, and is a monument more to his career as an Old India Hand than as a historian. His aim being to rescue the architects of British rule from ‘the oblivion into which they have fallen’, he ...”