“... Wordsworth, Johnston suggested, had been sent to Hamburg to warn the British minister there, Sir James Craufurd, of De Leutre’s activities. Much circumstantial detail was recruited to support this speculation. The story reached the newspapers and Wordsworthians could only answer that they felt in their bones that this was all very unlikely. In a ...”

“... Balzac and others, until the silly enterprise was laughed out of existence. To read, without prior permission, a ‘first-class’ author entailed excommunication. Or so they said. But French Catholics never stopped reading Rabelais. Only Protestants or Anglicans could print him openly. Protestants dropped his attacks on Calvin or turned them into ...”

“... with editions in every major language. This ambition suffered a setback when the paper’s editor, James Whelan, parted on bitter terms, alleging that all power on the paper was still concentrated among a handful of ex-KCIA Moonies. His replacement as editor was Arnaud de Borchgrave, a journalist long known for his extreme right-wing views and his sympathetic ...”

“... copies, you encounter blurbs the likes of which you’ve never seen before. ‘A marvel,’ Marlon James says. Daisy Johnson tells us that ‘Vuong is rewriting what fiction is supposed to be’ and – forgetting the medium – that ‘it’s a privilege to watch.’ ‘Thank you, Ocean Vuong,’ Michael Cunningham chimes, ‘for this brilliant and remarkable ...”

“... and he wrote in a post-fire letter that he ‘fortunately had a full copy of all that he had done prior to that summer.’ By the end of the following year, Ellison’s ‘story was changing’ and began to take on an increasing weight of tragic explanation: ‘To a reporter in Charlotte, North Carolina, Ralph mourned the loss of 365 pages, a neatly symbolic ...”

“... and modest compared to the exaggerations of the Bush Administration and its emissary to Pyongyang, James Kelly. Coming into office when the CIA’s ‘one or two devices’ estimate was nearly a decade old, Bush contrived to hype the threat, while at the same time downplaying the idea that its size made a difference: the North might have two or six or eight ...”

“... in Enfield, North London; Hillingdon, the closest emergency hospital to Heathrow Airport; and the James Paget in Great Yarmouth – declared their beds 100 per cent full on more than half the days in that winter period. Between them, the hospitals in Worcester and neighbouring Redditch had to divert emergency patients elsewhere at least 65 times. At Derriford ...”

“... literature’ and to modernism in particular presents problems. It is as easy to feel that James and Wells are incompatible as it is to reject the notion that Dostoevsky (let alone Oedipus Rex) has any family relationship with the detective story. When we come to Orlando or Pynchon, the conviction of incompatibility remains firm, but the arguments ...”

“... curly wig’ – but she was paid for the story, and in another instance was convicted of perjury. James Kirchick, in Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington (2022), notes some of the ‘code words and allusive phrases’ that journalists once used to suggest that the ‘nation’s top cop was not the model of American masculinity and traditional ...”

“... as a crampon. Granted, ‘My Name Is Prince’ comes out of an old-school black tradition, a James Brown-style boast: ‘On the seventh day he made – me!’ But the tone is all wrong: there’s no self-mockery here; he sounds desperate. On the lamentable rap ‘Sexy MF’, there’s no actual emotion in his voice; it’s about as erotic as the ...”

“... to the 50 per cent turnout threshold … Extend the period of notice unions must give employers prior to industrial action, from the current seven days to 14 days … Provide that industrial action ballot mandates … expire after a four-month period … Introduce new legal requirements relating to the supervision of picketing … for example, that a picket ...”

“... knowledge of what the law required, given that one of the things that defines conspiracy is the prior knowledge that the behaviour in question is unlawful. This would make a successful prosecution very difficult. The Mueller report concludes that investigators ‘did not obtain admissible evidence likely to meet the government’s burden to prove beyond a ...”

“... encounter with Europeans: Cook’s arrival and subsequent events, he says, jibe perfectly with prior Hawaiian beliefs, although the English vision of what is happening is very different from the Hawaiian one. What we call the history becomes a metaphor for Hawaiian expectations, and what we call the reality is decoded in terms of established (what we ...”

“... Chamberlain’s diaries, which includes an account of his meeting with Hitler at Berchtesgaden prior to the Munich conference in 1938. Blair is struck by how unfairly history has treated Chamberlain. ‘We are taught that Chamberlain was a dupe; a fool, taken in by Hitler’s charm. He wasn’t. He was entirely alive to his badness.’ Chamberlain ...”

“... words of Gerry Canavan, who in 2013 became the first scholar to open them. Butler had been reading James Lovelock and thinking about what would happen if humans migrated to other worlds while continuing to be ‘part of an earth organism in some literal way’: ‘phantom-limb pain’ was a phrase she used in the notes in the boxes. ‘A somehow neurologically ...”