“... This time the victim was a Christian missionary called Benjamin Weir. In January 1985, Father Lawrence Jenco was captured, to be followed three months later by Terry Anderson. Where was Ollie North all this time? In 1981, he was plucked from the Marines to serve on the National Security Council, which is attached to the White House. This was, North is too ...”

“... an alarming number of others seem to have stepped straight out of the condescending dreams of D.H. Lawrence and Malcolm Lowry, all immemorial wisdom and ethnic patience. They say things like ‘The soul of Mexico is very old,’ or ‘The road has its own reasons and no two travellers will have the same understanding of those reasons,’ or (in ...”

“... ship was put back on an even keel. Curiously, although the Grosart debacle, fully documented in John Bicknell’s edition of Stephen’s letters, is briefly mentioned in Alan Bell’s exemplary entry on Stephen in the ODNB, these misdemeanours make no appearance in Arthur Sherbo’s entry on Grosart. Thereafter, the DNB maintained its announced schedule ...”

“... last poems.) From the time he went at the age of 18 to Vanderbilt and attracted the attention of John Crowe Ransom and Robert Penn Warren it was glory all the way until he enlisted in the services a decade later. When in 1934 Allen Tate put together a poetry supplement for a magazine, it included several poets with firm reputations, but was headed by five ...”

“... biography, since the principals have to share top billing with Mrs Inchbald, Sheridan, Thomas Lawrence and Mrs Jordan. There is a curious line of contact between several of these figures: four of them were the subjects of biographies by James Boaden (1762-1839), who happened also to edit Garrick’s letters. Ms Kelly mentions these lives in her ...”

“... Managing editor: Alfred Perles; society editor: Anais Nin; sports editor: Charles Nordon (aka Lawrence Durrell); butter news editor: Walter Lowenfels; department of metaphysics and metapsychosis: Michael Fraenkel; fashion editor: Earl of Selvage (aka Henry Miller); and Lawrence Durrell and William Saroyan as the ...”

“... Eliot came in for a politely lethal rebuke after being pissy about Forster’s description of D.H. Lawrence as ‘the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation’. (‘Mr Eliot … asks me exactly what I mean by “greatest”, “imaginative” and “novelist” and I cannot say. Worse still, I cannot say what “exactly” means – only that there ...”

“... the problem. If his ‘diseased intellect’ makes Mr Phillips the kind of modern man D. H. Lawrence wanted to abolish – and makes D. H. Lawrence one of the phantom reviewers of the book – it is his very real shyness, his taken-for-granted embarrassments that make him so winning. He assumes, without boasting, an ...”

“... be at the actual scene of the killing to be found guilty and sent to jail,’ Detective Inspector John McFarlane said after the conviction of 17 of the 20 young people jointly charged with the murder of 15-year-old Sofyen Belamouadden at Victoria Station in March 2010: ‘the law on joint enterprise is clear and unforgiving.’ To be found guilty of murder as ...”

“... chemistry dominate both Holmes’s history and the period itself, but Holmes is interested too in John Herschel, William’s son, who nearly became a lawyer instead of the founder of the Astronomical Society; in Nevil Maskelyne, the astronomer royal at the Greenwich Observatory; in Mungo Park, the African explorer and the first European to reach the Niger; in ...”

“... have? Even Freud was able to get this much maths right in his famous remark to Fliess (cited by Lawrence Durrell at the start of The Alexandria Quartet and also here by Garber): ‘You are certainly right about bisexuality. I am also getting used to regarding every sexual act as one between four individuals.’ (Garber presents a lively history of the ...”

“... But even those whose overstatements are quoted against them – notably Carl Bridenbaugh and Lawrence Stone – do not claim that England in this period was as violent as 17th-century China or mafioso Sicily. They are principally arguing for a general predisposition to petty cruelty and impulsive striking-out greater than in contemporary ...”

“... David Bindman does not think that Hogarth was joking when he gave one of his contemporaries, John Nichols, a comic demonstration of minimalism: it took the form of a diagram composed of three lines and he claimed that it contained his memory of ‘a Sergeant with his pike going into an Ale House, and his Dog following ...”

“... oddly says all this will sound strange to western ears, though it was gospel to Blake and D.H. Lawrence and a lot of other people. Somebody should find out why is was so fashionable in those days – for it was also important to the ideologues of the Third Reich. And this is what angers Wiedmann, who hates Expressionist art, not only because he thinks it ...”

“... prosecution case against Edgar A. Poe looks a strong one. Taken in by the Richmond tobacco broker John Allan when left orphaned at the age of two by the death of his actress mother Eliza, brought up as a member of the family and sent to the University of Virginia, he responded by running up gambling debts and drinking, so that he left after a ...”