“... It may be that a partnership between art and sickness is a trademark of High Modernism, as Edmund Wilson argued in The Wound and the Bow. But if so, Lawrence wanted to be in a different business. Modernist sickness is more likely to be neurasthenia or hypochondria than the real thing, and to Lawrence, such sickness represents the fatal flaw of the modern ...”

“... to take advantage of greater European integration without being beholden to it. From Macmillan to Wilson to Heath to Thatcher to Major to Blair to Cameron, a succession of prime ministers persuaded themselves that their country was somehow different from the rest: it could pick and choose from the menu of European options in the way that suited it best. They ...”

“... formally agreed with China, irredentism also has been out. The prescriptive sovereignty of states, James Mayall makes clear in his cool account of where we now are, is indeed sovereign. But Lee Kuan Yew and others, in Asia and beyond, have claimed that once the lid is off, there could be much trouble, and in many places. The International Court will be asked ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... My 20th Century), class (The Prince and the Pauper, The Prisoner of Zenda), race (Puddn’head Wilson) or even species (Herakles and Iphikles, the immortal and mortal infant twins born of Zeus and Amphitryon). Lawrence Wright grounds what he calls ‘this widespread fantasy’ in other peoples’ studies of separated identical twins: Babies actually do ...”

“... a journalist, jobs he held and discarded, stayed in his thoughts and haunted his novels. William James believed that the careers we might have chosen don’t matter very much: ‘Little by little, the habits, the knowledges, of the other career, which once lay so near, cease to be reckoned even among his possibilities. At first, he may sometimes doubt ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... who has been credited with starting the Russo-Japanese war, and the stone-deaf old Etonian James Bourchier, who ‘successfully combined the roles of Times correspondent and founding father of modern Bulgaria’ (he was eventually sacked not for organising Balkan alliances but for being late with his copy and then over-filing). When Heren began his ...”

“... 20th, they should come to know and come to terms with a self-conscious sexuality too. Even Henry James, revising The American, first published in 1877, for a new edition in 1907, was moved to be more explicit about the meaning and motion in Newman’s discovery of his attraction to Madame de Cintré. Heath clearly does not like what he sees in capitalism, in ...”

“... of the prudes. But perhaps we will be expected to have come to terms by now with the Scots of James Kelman and Irvine Welsh, noting that the proportion of obscene language seems to be even higher in demotic Scots than in demotic English, at any rate in novels. Somebody should look into this matter. The work ‘fuck’ and its derivatives were timidly ...”

“... two decades on topics such as Dryden’s triplets, Shakespeare and anagrams, T.S. Eliot, Henry James, Byron, Norman Mailer, Ion Bugan, Samuel Beckett, Geoffrey Hill, and what Ricks argues is the non-distinction between poetry and prose. ‘Any claim to coherence has to be a mild one,’ Ricks says of the volume, since the two subjects, heroism and the ...”

“... the many efforts to render Pushkin in English rhyme and metre, got into a public spat with Edmund Wilson about the result of his labours, while admitting from the off that his version was not and could not be ‘it’. ‘To reproduce the rhymes and yet translate the entire poem literally is mathematically impossible,’ he wrote in his introduction. ‘But ...”

“... in spite of its invocation of the conservative revolutionary. While a genuine radical like James Cameron could famously say of himself that he was ‘conservative about everything except politics’, and while it’s true that the Anglo-American political culture holds a special niche permanently vacant for those bookish old ranters (Michael ...”

“... the names of explorers, famous in their day, but now known only to Arctic buffs, such as John and James Clark Ross, Rae, Pullen, Collinson, M’Clure, Austin, Ommanney, Richardson, Penny, DeHaven, Kane, Forsyth, Bellot, Kennedy, Belcher, Inglefield, M’Clintock – and names of ships, such as ...”