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“... of a heavy industry in academia. Ireland is a small nation – ‘an afterthought of Europe’, as James Joyce put it – and marginality is much in vogue at the moment. Yet it is also home to a magnificent body of literature, much of it written with wonderful convenience in the world’s premier language, and so easily accessible from Tokyo to Bogotá. Being ...”

“... offered to send her any books she wanted, for a copy of Wild America by Roger Tory Peterson and James Fisher. An account of a 30,000-mile journey around the continent by two naturalists, it was originally published in 1955 and was being reissued in memory of Peterson, who had recently died. Fitzgerald wanted it, however, for the sake of his co-author, who ...”

“... will be curious to read the future story of this intricate Warre,’ the royalist pamphleteer James Howell wrote in 1644, ‘will find himself much stagger’d, and put to a kind of riddle.’ There is still no consensus on its name: is it the English Civil War or the Puritan Revolution or the British Civil Wars or the Wars of the Three ...”

“... aficionados started touring the country in search of old records that a handful of them – Skip James, Son House, Mississippi John Hurt – were ‘rediscovered’. They became draws on the coffee-house and festival circuit, while recordings by John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, who had made their names playing house-rocking, amplified blues ...”

“... and saw inflation rise to 27 per cent before the Winter of Discontent that did for Callaghan. Jack Jones and Hugh Scanlon were not alone amongst trade-unionists in having ready access to No 10. The ‘tripartism’ of the Sixties had given way to what virtually amounted to a joint responsibility for government, with decisions of the General Council of the TUC ...”

“... instead mildly successful at W.H. Smith and the Times Bookshop. The case was altered only by James Douglas, the editor (also in a crusader’s spirit) of the Sunday Express. Douglas decided, a month later, to feature the book and its photogenic author, in her ‘severe’ smoking-jacket, as evidence of ‘the plague stalking shamelessly through public ...”

“... Place entertained a sparkling array of the period’s artists (Alma-Tadema, Whistler and Burne-Jones, with whom they were on especially intimate terms), writers (Barrie, Meredith, Hardy, Henry James), and theatrical people (Irving and Ellen Terry). Sargent painted Elizabeth, and Max Beerbohm drew no fewer than seven ...”

“... sexual transgression) was established. In his pioneering Othello’s Countrymen (1965), Eldred Jones showed how Shakespeare played upon and subverted associations of blackness and stereotypes of the ‘villainous Moor’ that were widespread in Elizabethan theatre. The pseudoscientific racists of the 18th and 19th centuries were putting old wine into new ...”

“... Assange’s bail, along with Jemima Khan, the daughter of the late tycoon and anarcho-capitalist James Goldsmith, whose contributions to British public life included repeated libel actions against Private Eye. Khan complained in her address outside the court that Assange’s treatment violated the ‘human right’ to freedom of information. It’s not ...”

“... I didn’t want to hear.’ She decided to stop talking to the bot. Her half-brother, Christopher Jones, commiserates with her and says she’s fallen for ‘death capitalism … they lure you into something in a vulnerable moment.’Both Barbeau and Angel used an app called Project December, the founder of which, Jason Rohrer, is profiled in Eternal ...”

“... Monette, David Leavitt and Armistead Maupin in the US, Alan Hollinghurst, Paul Bailey, Adam Mars-Jones in Britain – enjoy this crossover status. International comparisons, however, can be misleading, since they disguise the very different ways in which each country is culturally organised and politically structured. In Germany, where no major ...”

“... have opted for third-person narration, fertile territory for Jamesian negotiations of perspective (James being the writer whose effects he most admires). A stronger sense of a social web, and of the claims of belonging, has been evident, particularly in The Spell (1998), where domestic intimacy as well as pleasure-seeking was part of what the characters wanted ...”

“... his pen to whack golf balls, flick fishing rods or browse the bookstalls by the Seine (Henry James thought that Lang was too ‘insular and innocent’ to appreciate Paris). But he could only afford to be interested in a topic for the time it took to dash off an article about it. As Oxonian contemporaries racked up professorships, he became an aged ...”

“... looking for his copy of Nine Stories, on the inside cover of which he had made a list of the James Bond-style gadgets his grandfather had developed before being deployed in Europe. The book is there but the inside cover is blank, the tiny mystery solved when he works out that he and his first wife both had a copy of the book, and had inadvertently ...”

“... is more direct: ‘Erected to the memory of the heroes … Stephen Decatur Parish, James West Hadnot, Sidney Harris, who fell in the Colfax Riot fighting for White Supremacy, April 13, 1873.’ When EJI arrived in Montgomery there were more than fifty memorials of one sort or another to the glories of the Confederacy. They included a gold star ...”