“... such things, cites 88. Some had fallen on hard times, like Lord Strathspey, 31st chief of the Clan Grant, who was living in reduced circumstances in Putney, but most of the rest kept smart London establishments in Mayfair or Regent’s Park; they simply no longer wanted a country house. Land management was time-consuming and increasingly uneconomical, staff ...”

“... the tabloids. In America, as Brown points out, ‘no president … except Donald Trump … would grant access to the editor of the National Enquirer.’The Blair/Campbell secular benediction ‘the People’s Princess’ was surprisingly more than a slogan: Diana pre-empted the media, the conduit to the people. She got over being described as a Pinner ...”

“... to explain why he should have ended by being a marginal figure, in crying need of posterity to grant him his due. Largely, he had himself to blame, because with his genius of mind there went an untameable insolence of behaviour. Henry James met the 36-year-old Peirce in Paris in 1875, and reported to his brother William ...”

“... of brutes and should be exterminated to the last man.’ This statement shocked Henry Adams, James Russell Lowell, the Minister, and the other Americans present. They felt it inappropriate that a leading English politician should condemn his countrymen in such forthright terms in front of foreigners – as they saw themselves. They were, of ...”

“... was more practical: he included useful remarks about sites and materials, and suggested his own St James Piccadilly as a good, economical model. But the two architects agreed on many things, in particular that the new churches should stand free and not be crammed into the tight, built-up corners many City churches occupy.On the whole the Commissioners followed ...”

“... was in due course used as a blanket for the infant Langston (a middle name – he was baptised James, after his father). Mary’s next husband, Charles Henry Langston, was an abolitionist too; he insisted they name their son after Nat Turner, the leader of the 1831 Virginia slave revolt. His younger brother, John Langston, became one of the most prominent ...”

“... provinces to the home-ruling and ungarrisoned status they had enjoyed under Charles V and to grant them some measure of religious toleration’. But Philip regarded Elizabeth’s support for the Dutch as a war-like act and his direct response was to launch the Armada. England’s naval victory in 1588 was followed in the same year by a successful defence ...”

“... In one of literary history’s great instances of the pot calling the kettle black, Henry James complained of ‘the absence of spontaneity, the excess of reflection’ in George Eliot’s work. To other readers, of course, the proportion that Eliot – or even late James – sets up between narrative spontaneity (or action and event), on the one hand, and reflection or disquisition, on the other, seems harmonious and attractive, and it’s certainly easy enough to think of novels suffering from the opposite problem of lots of action and little thought ...”

“... semi-ingenuously. He teases Sagar from time to time too. ‘I’m puzzled by the reference to Cary Grant,’ Sagar writes, about a portrait from the poem ‘Sacrifice’ (‘The welts of his brow deepened, fold upon fold./Like the tragic mask./Cary Grant was his living double’): ‘He doesn’t seem to me to have a ...”

“... sparing herself no end of eventual aggravation.Into this vacancy the editor and biographer James Atlas tentatively ventured. He had made his name with a Life of Delmore Schwartz in 1977 and had matured into a venerable if fidgety fixture in New York publishing. He and Roth had been friendly for decades. Early in their relationship, which began in ...”

“... only republish. Professor Tucker thanks the University of Massachusetts for a Faculty Development Grant and the Samuel H. Kress Foundation for its support from 1975 to 1977. A lot of travel and research went into the book, which shows the benefits: a simple thesis, that Monet edited the landscape to make it seem more rural, has been backed up with a wealth of ...”

“... and might I presume on the leniency and compassion (this word underlined) of the assessors to grant me another six months to get my taxes in order? This was read out in a flat, bored voice so that, if one closed one’s eyes, one would swear that the reader – a terribly thin man – was simultaneously doing something else. I kept my eyes down, and ...”

“... that seamlessly combined white power fanaticism with anti-communism. In 1977, Beam received a grant from the state of Texas to build a simulated Vietnamese rice paddy in swampland near Houston: here, he trained recruits as young as 13 to kill an imaginary enemy. Four years later a promising opportunity presented itself. A number of South Vietnamese ...”

“... should be playing: the Mug, who seems OK at first but in the end has to give up the girl to Cary Grant or Spencer Tracy. The Sopranos, the programme for which Mad Men’s creator Matthew Weiner worked as a writer before getting his own series, is often invoked by journalists as a godparent to the newer show. The two share a focus on the world of men, a ...”

“... Alone’) and at greater length in ‘The Letter to the Foundation’, where the recipient of a grant scrupulously lists all the ways in which it did not transform her life. Davis herself won the Man Booker International Prize last year, and it wouldn’t be entirely out of character for her to write a similar letter to the panel of judges. Literature has ...”