“... to Arms. The desire for combat is paramount. ‘Not everyone feels such things so intensely,’ James Fenton writes in his introduction to the Everyman edition of the Collected Stories. Many are simply relieved not to have to fight. But the real test for someone of Hemingway’s cast of mind is: to serve in war as a soldier under military ...”

“... memories of the Wild Hunt, as Falstaff – visibly transfigured by the buck’s horns of Herne the Hunter – is tormented by Mistress Quickly’s Fairy Queen and Pistol’s Hobgoblin. The forest is always liable to appear as the unsettled and unsettling opposite of the urban world, a threatening other whose status as res nullius sets it against the ...”

“... with his impersonations. One evening Omai, the Tahitian tribal chief, comes to dinner (her brother James had been on Captain Cook’s second voyage). There is Joshua Reynolds and Richard Sheridan, and later Madame de Staël and Talleyrand. In her ostensibly private records of her life, Burney often keeps pace with current events and personalities, providing ...”

“... been explosively responsive to every experience, to have been courageous whether as a woodsman, a hunter after big game, a cross-country horseman, or a writer driven by penury – one cannot say poverty because he was a spendthrift with a folie de grandeur – to earn writing-time by any and every means from painting roofs in his meagre and sometimes mean ...”

“... On Hoxton Square, if anyone cares to notice it, is a blue plaque for the local physician, James Parkinson, who identified and described the neurological disease that carries his name. But now, with ever increasing speed, the memory traces of market gardens, madhouses, priories, holy wells, 19th-century radicalism, are being wiped out by the new ...”

“... to Madeira, or to some place where some ship is going – he does not know where,’ as his friend James Spedding said of another abrupt departure. Sometimes he would drop in on old friends like the Rawnsleys in Horncastle, whose daughter Sophie and her friends Rosa Baring and Catherine Franklin he had once flirted with, though Catherine was now shocked to see ...”

“... made by Quaker companies like Barclay’s and Lloyd’s banks, Bryant and May matches, Swan Hunter shipbuilders and Cadbury itself. In Victorian Britain, Quaker businessmen had competitive advantages. Ron Davies, in his biography of George Stephenson (Quakers were early financiers of the railways), talks about a Quaker ‘moral mafia’. In a commercial ...”

“... and top hats, with their horses and hounds. Ridley said he’d never been a rider, let alone a hunter. ‘We’re just jumped-up 18th-century industrialists trying to pretend we’re toffs,’ he said. He was less complimentary than I expected about his ancestors’ capitalistic-oligarchic ways. ‘I don’t think we’re particularly impressive as an ...”

“... sectarian theories and practices.The first issue of Partisan Review included a section from James T. Farrell’s once famous Studs Lonigan trilogy, which relates the young manhood and eventual destruction of a Catholic boy from Chicago, as well as improving tales written in would-be proletarian style. There was an attack on bourgeois literary critics ...”

“... we not rub ourselves with grease and ashes we would not last long.’ We’re not far here from James Fenimore Cooper’s linguistic register in The Last of the Mohicans (‘Are the Hurons dogs, to bear this? Who shall say to the wife of Menowgua that the fishes have his scalp, and that his nation have not taken revenge?’). When Mali’s son Theotiste ...”

“... Loach, who joined the BBC as a trainee director in 1963, and Tony Garnett, who had been hired by James MacTaggart, producer of the Wednesday Play series, as a story editor and talent scout. Taking advantage of MacTaggart being on holiday, Garnett put sufficient resources into the project to ensure that it would be too expensive to cancel by the time he got ...”

“... exhausted by working, and miserable that she didn’t have enough time to write. She read instead: James, Woolf (‘I shall go better than she. No children until I have done it’) and Lawrence: ‘Why do I feel I would have known & loved Lawrence – how many women must think this and be wrong!’ They had a lot of morning sex.In June 1958, she had her first ...”

“... for him when he returned to make a war movie, The Thin Red Line (1998), which he adapted from James Jones’s novel about the Battle of Guadalcanal. A predatory crocodile slides and slowly sinks into green water to the sound of an ominously sustained chord. Then, over images of a jungle, with sunbeams peering through thick foliage, an unidentified voice ...”

“... sometimes to good purposes, sometimes not: ‘laboured and complex but not rich’, says George Hunter of the verse of All’s Well, and he also calls it ‘unfunctional’. However, it is in later work that one finds the most laboured and complex examples. It will be said that the instances I provide come from what might be called post-retirement ...”

“... sea and back to us as more carbohydrate. The carbon loop used to be closed, and if we had stuck to hunter-gathering and muscle-powered farming, it might have stayed so for ever.Then we found fossil fuels. Marco Polo reported that the Chinese kept warm by burning black stones, but our present energy gluttony has its origins in Abraham Darby’s successful use ...”