“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... dies. Journalists who worked for Beaverbrook speak of him with a combination of awe and affection. James Macmillan and John Ellison, who were so much of the Daily Express for so long, describe this slow, mocking North American voice coming over the phone with approbation or a grumble and always creating a frisson. Both have said to me, ‘You would have liked ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of state, assistant to the president and special envoy to Libya. Bolton started appearing on Fox News to offer hawkish and sympathetic readings of Trump’s foreign policy; Trump gave him Oval Office visiting privileges. By early 2018, Trump was floating the idea of Bolton replacing Rex Tillerson – the former ExxonMobil CEO who inconveniently opposed ...”

“... intellectuals, call-in shows, whathaveyou. Here they have NPR, which delivers the same news as Fox or CBS, but in a sanctimonious schoolmasterly tone of voice. In between there’s music. Good music usually. There’s no news in Texas. Football is news. Murder and larceny is news. Vince Young, the former UT quarterback, signed a $50 million ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... professor of psycho-physiology at the University of Geneva, friend of William James (and later Carl Jung) and enthusiastic debunker of putatively occult phenomena. Since the late 1880s Flournoy, whose deceptively chivalrous, self-effacing manner concealed a penetrating forensic intelligence, had eagerly sought a medium on whom to test his ...”

“... the full voie lactée, with a final push to Finisterre. (He wanted to step beyond the legend of St James, slayer of Moors, back to the earlier Roman track to the end of the western lands.) There was no discussion around the great Euro debate, the marchers were too busy arguing over different accounts of Edith Swan-Neck and scratching at their tablets and ...”

“... relieved only by learning to sail; an ambience of ‘French lessons, books, horses, travel, fox hunting and a governess’, brought to an end by the Great Depression; intelligence work during the war, then a decision to write instead of taking up a diplomatic post. The conservative intelligentsia, already enamoured of the novels’ nostalgic, patriotic ...”

“... and plants of the forest, but is capable of transforming himself into their likeness: Into a fox himself he first did turn; But he him hunted like a fox full fast: Then to a bush himself he did transform, But he the bush did beat, till that at last Into a bird it changed, and from him past, Flying from tree to ...”

“... Lord Grey of the Reform Bill (1920) he saw the war as having ‘been fought on the principles of Fox and Grey’, and in 1937, writing the life of the Foreign Secretary who had taught his wife her knowledge of birds, he accepted that ‘we were wrong and Grey was right’. His main war work was as Commandant (1915-18) of the Friends’ Ambulance Unit in ...”

“... for the sake of its clean, clear, genre sequences about the MacCallum family, a possum hunt, a fox, an encounter with a nigger (always ‘niggers’ in Faulkner) towards the end of the book. Talent can write alone. Genius never. It was his arrogant error not to realise it. Why did he not always write so well? Whence this division? We need no psychologist ...”

“... Post at the time of Watergate or destroying notes gleaned from Deep Throat, their best source. James Goodale, the lawyer for the New York Times while it was attempting to publish the Pentagon Papers, made the case most strongly that it was a First Amendment issue, and that the paper had a duty to present the material brought to it by Daniel ...”

“... and monetise them. Pat King, the most outspoken of the organisers, livestreamed his own arrest. James Bauder, the Prairie born-again Christian who started the convoy, believes God told him to do it in a prayer. Confronted by a journalist about the claim that Covid is a ‘plandemic’ – GlaxoSmithKline owns the Wuhan lab, Soros and Bill Gates are in on ...”