“... Parker, J.D. Salinger, E.B. White, Katharine White (the Mrs White of his telegram) and the sainted William Maxwell – nor did he pull up the ladder against younger novices coming aboard. So entwined was his identity with the New Yorker and its denominational place in American fiction that for a time there was talk of the three Johns: O’Hara, Cheever and ...”

“... business as a Maltese cat’.Mabel now concentrated on their publicity strategy. She contacted William Dean Howells, editor of the Atlantic Monthly, who agreed to write a piece on Dickinson. Of all the reviewers of the 1890 volume, Howells was the most intuitive:Occasionally, the outside of the poem, so to speak, is left so rough, so rude, that the art ...”

“... wharfinger who soon succumbs to cholera. Adopted by a parson and educated as a doctor, his son William turns up at Guy’s Hospital playing hand to the mind of James Hinton – a surgeon in whose philosophy the Ripper’s role as ‘time’s abortionist’ is first outlined. White Chappell is preoccupied by the Ripper murders, but Sinclair is not seeking ...”

“... saying to a Shadow Cabinet meeting on 31 July 1971, ‘the address on which my father’ – William Wedgwood Benn, a Liberal, then Labour MP, created Viscount Stansgate in 1941 – ‘fought the election in 1906: cheap food, reform and prosperity for the Port of London, freedom for the trade unions and justice for Ireland – and it doesn’t seem as if ...”

“... like Solly Zuckerman tell us how it was for them, and perceptive novelists such as Nigel Balchin, William Cooper and C.P. Snow expose much that is true in the guise of fiction. Drawing upon a variety of sources – reports of Royal Commissions, obiter dicta of scientific notables, newspaper editorials etc – Dr Gummett gives us the first ...”

“... the jury Magna Carta referred to wasn’t anything like what we now understand by the term. William Holdsworth, in his History of English Law, commented: ‘A trial by a royal judge and a body of recognitors who found the facts was exactly what the barons did not want. What they did want was first a tribunal of the old type in which all the suitors were ...”

“... time fitting in without much money. He worked as a postman in Trenton, and managed to get enough cash together to join an eating club. Largely friendless and suspicious of the motives of the other members, he soon resigned. He spent a summer in Europe, discovered he had a knack for foreign languages, and resisted returning to Milwaukee, or enrolling in law ...”

“... most of the most outlandish things still lay ahead of him, and he was stuck in the Canary Islands, William Carlos Williams wrote: ‘Bunting is living the life, I don’t know how sufficiently to praise him for it. But it can’t be very comfortable to exist that way. I feel uneasy not to be sending him his year’s rent and to be backing at the same time a ...”

“... tragedy, a squandered opportunity, a failure. ‘What was it he had missed?’ Kazin asks of William Dean Howells, whose modest novels fought the battle for realism as best they could. ‘Howells had missed something, and he knew it as well as the generations after him were to know it . . . He had spoken in all the accents of greatness without ever ...”

“... then suddenly dismantled because the demise of their founders left their heirs subject to a large cash charge on non-liquid assets. Never mind that the most obvious remedy for injustices of this kind was simply to raise the exemption levels (from $650,000 for individuals and $1.3 million for couples) rather than to abolish a tax whose revenue derived mostly ...”

“... good place not to go out from. A self-curated mausoleum of memories: photographs, toys, magazines, William Morris wallpaper, Arts and Crafts furniture; a library of Victorian and Edwardian fiction, Stevenson, Meredith, Wells, Conrad, W. Pett Ridge. Moorcock, with his sacred cats in a basket, brings up a map of London on his screen, shifting and rearranging ...”

“... we understand the same rule to apply here? If Tony Blair had been charged with selling honours for cash, could he (or John Reid, or Jacqui Smith, or whoever was home secretary at the time) have procured the grant of a pardon in the name of the queen? I can’t think any British lawyer would give an affirmative answer to the question. One ground for rejecting ...”

“... the first ‘gas bridge’ were complicated. The Soviet president, Leonid Brezhnev, wanted the cash from energy exports to Europe to help fund the arms race with the US and support the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. But other members of the nomenklatura felt the money should be used differently. Kosygin thought it should be channelled into civilian ...”

“... and he soon became a must-see metropolitan attraction. Joshua Reynolds painted his portrait and William Parry did an ensemble piece of Mai, Solander and Banks. Mai met the king, Dr Johnson and Fanny Burney; a play about him was performed at the Theatre Royal; he learned to play chess and backgammon, and many agreed with Mrs Thrale’s comment about the ...”

“... a vat of nutrient juices had been a staple of speculative fiction at least since the 1920s. In ‘William and Mary’ from 1954 (twice rejected by the New Yorker), Dahl embeds that cliché of genre fiction in a dodgy relationship between a bullying academic husband and a resentful wife. The don agrees to have his brain taken out so it can live on after his ...”