“... reports of witnessing executions and five different accounts of hot-air balloon voyages. There is John Addington Symonds’s description of Tennyson and Gladstone discussing Governor Eyre’s suppression of the 1865 uprising in Jamaica, during which Tennyson sounds like a 19th-century Mark Fuhrman (‘Niggers are tigers, niggers are tigers’). Jane Austen ...”

“... morals to aesthetics in a challenging new-old fashion. And it’s a question, as ever with John Banville, within other questions. Who, for instance, you’re made to wonder at this point in Ghosts, is actually asking? Some anonymous narrator? The author? The novel’s own enigmatic ‘evil man’, the one who does so much of its telling and, it turns ...”

“... In​ the original film noir, John Huston’s Maltese Falcon (1941), private investigator Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) visits criminal mastermind Kasper Gutman (Sydney Greenstreet) in his San Francisco hotel room to discuss the delivery of a mysterious ornament. The elevator attendant points him in the direction of Room 12c ...”

“... 16th century. And when Sherlock Holmes in the ‘Adventure of the Norwood Builder’ (1903) greets John Hector McFarlane, who has just burst unceremoniously into 221b Baker Street, with the words ‘you mentioned your name, as if I should recognise it, but I assure you that, beyond the obvious facts that you are a bachelor, a solicitor, a Freemason, and an ...”

“... has now disappeared to be replaced by another, this time by the succeeding general editors, John Barnard and Paul Hammond. They claim fidelity to Bateson except where he has come to seem fallible. For instance, he insisted on modernising spelling and punctuation; but why modernise Browning, and why meddle with Marvell’s punctuation, which is important ...”

“... perception, what she terms the ‘Oedipal eye’. No woman, however talented, could paint easily, freely, productively in the 19th century, when the idea of the artist in the studio assumed, at core, men’s free access to naked women. Women in paintings, clothed or not, had always had a limited range of meanings (maternality, eros, domesticity) and were ...”

“... speed – can create large quantities of assets for itself – simply by lending money much too freely. This HBOS did. The parliamentary report found that in the three years after the crash, £25 billion of UK corporate loans, mostly involving commercial property, had gone wrong; the figure amounted to 20 per cent of the loan book. Even without all the ...”

“... close of World War II. He attended Harvard, where he began a close friendship with his classmate, John Ashbery. After a year (1950-51) in Michigan writing and translating poetry, he moved to New York, where he rejoined his Harvard friends and their friends – among them the poets Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler and Barbara Guest – becoming part of a social ...”

“... attitude’ to the use of reason. ‘How can a man think at all, if he does not think freely? Christ himself told us to be freethinkers, and Socrates was a freethinker.’ The work from which this comes is another mock-argument, and this sentiment, in isolation seeming so reasonable to us ‘moderns’, belongs to a ‘discourse’ that is as much ...”

“... his own contribution would be the syntax linking them. But the Phonotypia example shows, too, how freely he distorted the sounds he began with; this was a looser procedure than the earlier one and gave him a wider choice of possibilities. To many, Roussel will seem a petty or a futile writer: a punster who even hid the evidence of his punning. But the ...”

“... is off-putting: he begins with Barbara Amiel’s marriage, at which he has former lovers freely discussing her sexual prowess, and never lets up in hostility for a moment. He says that writing the book was an ‘unmitigated pleasure’, and you believe him, but it does leave the reader feeling like a witness at an execution. It’s probably easier to ...”

“... in a country as stiflingly curricular as France was up to a point a blessing: Malraux read more freely and thought more expansively than he might have done had he stayed on at school. Expansiveness can go too far, however, and with Malraux it did, allied as it was to a quickness of mind that could leave toiling interlocutors for dead. The outcome, when he ...”

“... in The Tiger and the Rose; but he is evidently not quite satisfied with them. Turn for a moment to John Masters’s strangely similar novel, Man of War. It is an apologia for another sort of fighting man, a professional soldier. The hero, Dusty Miller, squeezes his way into the British Army during World War One, aged only 16; when World War Two comes ...”

“... with being a “man”’. Fletcher advances his ideas with great confidence, taking issue freely and frequently with most of the other experts in the field, living and dead. He is well qualified to do so because the book is based on diverse and deep research, Fletcher being the master of both the medical and didactic works which deal with the ‘ages ...”

“... If you have money, it’s not hard.’ And so she came to Accra, and the Paradise Hotel. When John Chernoff met Hawa in Ghana in 1971, she was a round-faced doll-woman who spoke ten languages. She entertained her bar and nightclub companions with stories of her life, punctuated with bursts of laughter. Chernoff heard such laughter everywhere. Travelling ...”