“... well as business talent, to bring together A. E. W. Mason, George Douglas, Raffles, Gissing, Henry James and Jack London in the same series, and in the name of pleasure. One sees that the middlebrow had still not quite secured its grasp upon Britain. One’s sense of Buchan the man, as derived from the excellent and engaging memoir by his son William, is of ...”

“... of the most candid confessors since Frank Harris’ and ‘An unholy cross between James Joyce and Hunter S. Thompson’. These remarks tend to compound an already severe identity crisis. For almost a decade, Gray has been delivering monologues which chronicle his life from early childhood to the present. Since ‘Sex and Death to the Age ...”

“... very easy after all that arduous tiling. He was writing at a time when such masters as Henry James, Conrad and Ford were agonising a lot about modern technique, but although he seems to have found the business of technique quite interesting – or rather, although he made a few knowing nods in that direction – what he really liked was to get on with ...”

“... Vietnam but was told by the chairman to sit down. He refused and was eventually dragged from the hall to a mixture of applause and shouts of ‘shame’ and ‘undemocratic’. McNamara and his party seemed worried, Lewis concluded, and ‘Labour tacticians admitted they had made a mistake by giving Mr Gott another headline.’‘Our intervention in Hull ...”

“... to royal progresses. Festivity could be used to serve political purposes too, as Elizabeth I and James I realised: they resurrected older festive traditions or invented new ones, developing them into cults and electing themselves as the chief divinities. In his discussion of periodic jollifications Laroque is judicious, superbly informed and meticulous; he ...”

“... While I was having a weekly supervision from Richards, in my final year, I was listening to the James Smith group, who favoured T.S. Eliot and Original Sin. After each of his supervisions, as I remember, though I had enjoyed and learned from them enormously, I would goad the enemy by reporting some theologically absurd remark, typical of an expert on ...”

“... Shirley Temple. There are ribbons and rosy cheeks and ringlets and more than a touch of Henry James. In a letter to her father, Lawrence wrote of his wish to ‘snatch’ a fleeting moment of beauty before the inevitable ‘change’ took place. The whole effect is, at least to modern tastes, quite revolting.Degas’s Miss Murray is different. He ignores ...”

“... judges were long ago steered away from wigs by Thomas Jefferson, who, having visited Westminster Hall, reported: ‘We must not have men sitting in judgment who look like mice peeping out of oakum.’ The Bar of England and Wales will have to decide whether to wear wigs to address now bareheaded benches, and what they decide will either amplify or silence ...”

“... searched Australia for a town called Carnegie so that he could stand in front of its town hall with his body obliterating the word TOWN and be photographed for the cover of his album BARRY HUMPHRIES AT CARNEGIEHALL. Nowadays Edna satisfies that urge on his behalf. She punishes Australia for its vulgarity by personifying it for a startled world, and ...”

“... with ‘blue-collar conservatism’ see an opportunity in the new electoral geography. As Stuart Hall observed when analysing the rise of Thatcherism, a powerful political force can weld together seeming contradictions, just as what he called Thatcher’s regressive modernisation yoked nostalgic moralism together with a renovated British ...”

“... book would have to be written on a laptop that had no internet access. When I arrived at Ellingham Hall Assange was fast asleep. He’d been living there, at the house of Vaughan Smith, one of his sureties and founder of the Frontline Club, since his arrest on Swedish rape allegations. He was effectively under house arrest and wearing an electronic tag on his ...”

“... they designed a glassy, Mediterranean block of flats and shops in Clipstone Street in Fitzrovia, a hall of residence for Woolwich Polytechnic and two blocks as part of that comprehensive redevelopment of Gospel Oak. All these buildings have been in the guide at one time or another, although Woolwich Poly’s halls, noted for their ‘search for a lost ...”

“... only interesting but plausible and even convincing. One, however, is not, an episode known as the Hall-Mills murder case, which unfolded in the newspapers over many months. The double killing of an Episcopal minister and his lover occurred on the night of 14 September 1922, a few days before Fitzgerald and his wife arrived in New York. A social gulf separated ...”

“... the many other times when leavis wanted to put someone down, the model for his prose was Henry James, than whom no stylist could be more ornate and mandarin. If he wished to Invoke the authority of a central critical tradition, he was adept at echoing Arnold. Coleridge or Samuel Johnson, as he did in his assault on C.P. Snow: ‘The peculiar quality of ...”