“... On 29 January 1884 Henry James noted a story which he had heard from Gertrude Tennant. It struck him ‘as a dramatic and pretty subject’. Young Lord Stafford, it seemed, was in love with Lady Grosvenor, whom he had known before her marriage, but had now no expectation of being able to marry as her husband was alive and robust ...”

“... True, no. Room goes in for a lot of roguish commenting but not for annotation when it is needed. James McConnell, The Benedictine Commando, 1981 – For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night. Room: ‘The dedication suggests a quotation.’ And that’s true too. Shakespeare’s Sonnet 30, actually. An editor ought to rise to an occasional ...”

“... like that at the Villa Mauresque. The book should have a special piquancy for those familiar with James Lees-Milne’s sparkling volumes about the years he spent flitting round stately homes during and after World War Two, making the most of such high life as was going. The most recent volume is Midway on the Waves; the others, all with titles lifted or ...”

“... of judges who wanted to make a reality of human rights it has taken wing. A peevish essay here by James Allan criticises them for deciding that, even though they cannot interfere with incompatible legislation, they can at least declare that it is incompatible. For such critics I doubt whether judges can do anything right. As to South Africa, which, with the ...”

“... of secular freethinkers, followers of the New Life, of Olive Schreiner and the sexual radical James Hinton. While involved in this doll’s house in reverse, Ellis attended St Thomas’s Hospital to complete a medical training. He had an unsatisfactory, rather destructive, semi-relationship with Olive Schreiner, with both parties withdrawing as weaknesses ...”

“... book is very much of its time. Since the enthusiastic re-evaluation of Emerson by Stanley Cavell, Harold Bloom and, most importantly, Richard Poirier, Emerson’s stock has probably never stood higher. He seems, temporarily, to have moved into a privileged place beyond criticism. But I wonder if that is good for him. In 1887 Henry ...”

“... make him into a person. Before, anybody could have played his part.’ It is often said that Jimmy James became the best stage drunk ever seen in British variety by recognising that drunks don’t act drunk: that a defining characteristic of drunkenness is the strained, and therefore inadvertently funny, attempt to appear sober. Morecambe understood the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Anyone who knew or knew of James Lees-Milne in his later years might have formed the impression of an exquisitely polished round peg in a perfectly round hole. Aesthete, diarist, wit, he had known everyone from the Mitfords to Mick Jagger and wrote about them amusingly. His work for the National Trust over three decades had made him personally and professionally familiar with most of the great houses of England ...”

“... The spirit is sometimes called Structuralism, sometimes Deconstruction or Post-Structuralism. James Gribble’s book is a call to action: the teaching of literature, he argues, should be based upon the centrality of literary criticism. Literary criticism is ‘that form of discourse which undertakes the analysis of works of literature so as to do justice ...”

“... took Marlon into her family: that meant her brother, the actor Luther Adler; her second husband, Harold Clurman, a leader of the Group Theatre, and Stella’s daughter from a previous marriage, Ellen, who was three years younger than Marlon. She and Marlon became lifelong friends, and they were lovers over the years (this is tactfully handled by Mann just ...”

“... 5. Rab Butler said: ‘Sir Anthony Eden is the best prime minister we have.’ 6. Harold Macmillan campaigned in the 1959 Election on the slogan: ‘You’ve never had it so good.’ 7. Edward Heath gave his word to ‘cut rising prices at a stroke’. 8. Shirley Williams joined Arthur Scargill on a mass picket at Grunwicks. 9. ...”

“... The book has its international theme (with Jacobson’s native South Africa substituted for Henry James’s America), and it raises Jamesian uncertainties about who, in the end, is the victim of whom, and about where guilt truly lies. Hidden in the Heart isn’t a book for those who don’t believe in coups de foudre, or who think that once the erotic storm ...”

“... simply make[s] one sit still in an apathy, and watch the clock spinning backwards’. For Henry James, the war seemed ‘to undo everything’: ‘My sense of what is generally happening all about us here is only unutterable,’ he confessed to Brander Matthews. The country house, that central prop of the idyllic British afternoon, figured prominently in ...”

“... in Britain.’ Nobody in government seems to have wondered how many people might use those rights. James Chuter Ede, the Labour home secretary, merely observed that ‘we recognise the right of the colonial peoples to be regarded as men and brothers of the people in this country.’How about ‘as women and sisters’? Until 1948 a British woman (not a ...”