“... that is both affectionate and scornful, runs like an underground current through his work. Henry James and Lenny Bruce are often taken to be Roth’s improbably paired patron saints, but it is possible to add Eleanor Roosevelt to the gallery – or at least Henry Wallace and Paul Robeson, whose names are murmured half-reverentially throughout Roth’s ...”

“... could arouse formidable resentments. It should, by now, be no matter for surprise that under James, the mechanism of supposedly ‘Puritan’ discipline was frequently carried out through the official machinery of the Church courts, nor that under Charles, this was increasingly rarely the case. That we have in these issues one of the sources of the ...”

“... document issued under the Great Seal allowing him to seize pirates too, and an even more unusual grant from King William stating that the Adventure Galley and her owners could keep everything she took – no tedious Vice-Admiralty courts and sharing of the spoils, nothing to be given back to the original owners. With these papers and a vessel that gauged 287 ...”

“... more temperate shores. In The Play of the Eyes (1985) Canetti tells of how in Zurich in 1935 James Joyce attended a reading by Canetti of his Comedy of Vanity, a play turning on the interdiction of mirrors and images, and largely in Viennese dialect. During the intermission Joyce announced in hostile tones: ‘I shave with a straight razor and no ...”

“... lovers. Among the most influential of these dancer-lovers was Michael Somes, who, with Alexander Grant and Brian Shaw, remained loyal throughout hit career. Somes was a charismatic leading man, and partner to Fonteyn. There were inevitable jealousies within the company when Somes – at 17 – was given leading roles, but Ashton was too professional to risk ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the most dubious morality. Building on the classic image of Walsingham as spymaster established by James Anthony Froude’s History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada (1856-70), his early 20th-century biographers, Sidney Lee and Conyers Read, presented him as an astute and distinguished patriot who laid the foundations for ...”

“... he had to sell the boat and return to dentistry.’ The book is dedicated to his father – ‘For James Edwin Vann, 1940-80’ – and the dedication page bears a fuzzy photograph of a man and a boy in wet-weather gear, holding up their fishing catch. Although ostensibly a super-smooth, mucho-macho Vanity Fair-style account of his failed attempt to establish ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... DNA Sequencing System cost $110,000; and when the NIH baulked at the expense, Venter dipped into a grant he still held from the Pentagon to finance its purchase. The machine arrived at the NINDS laboratory in 1987, and Venter remembers thinking: ‘This was my future in a crate.’ The relationship between machine and user wasn’t passive – Venter had to do ...”

“... but with its own impulsion. Mrs Trilling turned upon Mailer T.S. Eliot’s praise of Henry James as having a mind so fine that no idea could violate it: ‘Of Mailer we can say that his novelist’s mind is peculiarly violable by idea, even by ideology.’ But the greatness of The Executioner’s Song is, surprisingly, in Mailer’s having manifested a ...”

“... lecturer. He died in 1944. Leacock held his own in the world of Will Rogers, Robert Benchley, James Thurber, the early Wodehouse, A.P. Herbert and ‘Beachcomber’. Americans, or some of them, accepted him as a successor to Mark Twain. His Yankee-style hyperbole did not, for once, upset the British, for he practised the tricks of ‘sly English ...”

“... but Grace would never be finished And: In 1973 the five pillboxes on Makapuu Head had seemed to James Jones exactly as he had left them in 1942. In 1973 the Royal Hawaiian Hotel had seemed to James Jones less formidably rich than he had left it in 1942 … Both passages evoke the passing of time with the same reflexive ...”

“... With his first earnings as a garden labourer, the boy walked to Aberdeen and bought six volumes of James Hervey’s Reflections on a Flower Garden – just as Clare had tramped from Helpston to Stamford, before the bookshop opened, to secure a coveted copy of James Thomson’s The Seasons. And like Clare, Sinclair paused on ...”

“... seductively in his recent memoir, Between the World and Me. Formally modelled on the first part of James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, the book is addressed to Coates’s teenage son, Samori, on the occasion of the non-indictment of Brown’s killer, a white police officer called Darren Wilson. ‘We are captured, brother, surrounded by the majoritarian ...”