“... at Stonyhurst, better than it does Andrew himself, who was brought up by a private tutor at Marbot Hall. But what it describes is one half of the English experience Hildesheimer presents, the foil against which the other half – Andrew’s life – must be seen. More recent German Anglophiles have found that there is a price to pay for these attractive ...”

“... and so on. On this reading, Major could be presented as a drearier-than-either cross between James Stewart and J. Alfred Prufrock. He was prime minister by accident, or for-a-day. He’d won the premiership in a raffle, or had it laid on for him by Jim’ll Fix It. There was of course a brutal snobbishness in this approach, as there had been in all the ...”

“... the lovingly created detail’ – reference to six little photographs superimposed on drawings of James Stirling’s building for the Mappin and Webb site in the City of London – ‘as well as their scale that makes the listed buildings so important. Look at the replacement. Is somebody supposed to jump from this tower?’ It is an easy book to mock, but at ...”

“... fate of becoming an accessory to the life of a more important writer. It is his friend Henry James who keeps Sturgis’s novel distantly in view, at the same time as casting a long shadow over it. James read it in proof, and wrote a characteristic sequence of letters to Sturgis about it, beginning with neat praise and ...”

“... James Purdy​ ’s literary career comes with its own creation myth. He had been making no headway until in 1956 Edith Sitwell read a privately printed book of his stories and, ravished, threw herself into finding him a publisher and an audience. In one version of the event, Don’t Call Me by My Right Name, the book Purdy sent from America to Italy, made the last stage of its journey supernaturally, materialising by Sitwell’s bedside when she woke from a nap ...”

“... party, came dressed as Henry VIII and fed lion meat to his guests. Back in the mutinous 1960s, James Baldwin promised a ‘fire next time’. But the fire this time comes in cool, ironic novels like Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities. When Oliver Stone released his satirical movie Wall Street, the business press embraced the slick financial ...”

“... saying that the only VC awarded to an Ulsterman during the war had been won by a Catholic, James Magennis. One of the people on the panel, his boss, came back at him in a dull stupid rigid voice: ‘I happen to know he only got the Victoria Cross because he happened to be a Catholic.’ That combination of bigotry, crassness and sheer thick ignorance ...”

“... colonial past. Time was a source of conflict for the early inhabitants of the English colonies. James I, Charles I and Archbishop Laud held that the Sabbath should serve as a day for diversion as well as for worship. The Book of Sports, a set of regulations for Sundays and Holy Days issued by James in 1618, decreed ...”

“... Baroness James, making a rare visitation to a blighted metropolitan zone, downriver of Tower Bridge, has written a very useful book, a book on which I will be happy to draw for years to come. That was back in 1972. Title? The Maul and the Pear Tree; co-authored by T.A. Critchley of the Police Department at the Home Office, where James then earned her crust as a Principal in the Criminal Policy Department ...”

“... at Harvard, that Cambridge was still thought of as the home of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and James Russell Lowell, both recently deceased, and that across the river was a Boston which still called itself ‘the Athens of America’. Edward Cummings, the father, was a man of modern outlook, if only in certain respects. A sociologist who had been at ...”

“... his writing, and we are told that Emerson kept a print of Vesuvius in eruption in his front hall at Concord all his life. More than once, Richardson makes claims for Emerson as a sort of closet Dionysus, quoting from his journal: ‘O Bacchus, make them drunk, drive them mad, this multitude of vagabonds, hungry for eloquence, hungry for poetry, starving ...”

“... staff at Los Alamos, recruited even before he got his bachelor’s degree. His roommate Ted Hall was the second youngest staff member. Hall was also one of the three known Russian spies at Los Alamos. Of course, the chemist James Conant, who was president of Harvard, had been one of ...”

“... of the King Edward potato, adding perfunctorily that it was not ‘an eating potato’. Henry James would have seen the point. In 1870 he wrote to his elder brother William from Malvern, England, where the hotel fed him mostly on mutton and potatoes, to say how much he missed ‘unlimited tomatoes & beans & peas & squash & turnips & carrots & corn – I ...”

“... On​ 12 December 1884, Henry James took a break from writing the novel that would be published as The Princess Casamassima and went on a research trip to Millbank Prison on the north bank of the Thames. The prison was swampy, labyrinthine and dark. In the novel, Hyacinth Robinson, an impressionable young bookbinder, goes there to visit his dying mother, whose criminal past, we soon learn, has a central role in her son’s mentality and is a cause of his undoing, as he becomes lost in a London filled with social venom and anarchist plots ...”

“... speaker. Poor fellow, I thought, facing those three. I read on. The poor fellow was revealed to be James Woolsey, a former director of the CIA. I knew nothing about him. I googled his name and found out that in July Woolsey had called on the US to bomb Syria. My stitches started hurting again. I didn’t have time to catch my breath: the driver told me to pick ...”