“... Texas fraudmeisters, a disaster locked into place by Davis’s Republican predecessor, Pete Wilson, whose advisers are now clustering around Schwarzenegger like flies in a privy. Davis hardly helped, renewing the corrupt contracts and allowing Texas corporations to sell California’s energy back to California at an obscene mark-up. Last ...”

“... between Proust, Mann, Gide, Genet, Forster, Woolf, Stein, Langston Hughes, Djuna Barnes and Henry James, it may be more accurate to say that the modernist novel is a queer invention with a smattering of heterosexual imitators, many of them notably preoccupied with queer concerns. After the war, the mantle was passed from Vidal, Isherwood, Baldwin and Capote ...”

“... presence described Siraj and his nobles as ‘crafty, devious and venal’. In 1817, however, James Mill, in his History of British India, deplored the ‘plotting and intrigue’ that deposed the nawab, and subsequently, in a gesture of reconciliation, an obelisk put up by Holwell to commemorate the deaths was removed. But by the 1840s the mood had ...”

“... in Britain. The Report on a Highway Plan for Glasgow, produced by the consultant engineers Scott Wilson Kirkpatrick for the corporation in 1965, is extraordinarily bold. The city centre – in the report, a dense, slum-ridden, sooty horror – has been evacuated and encircled by a vast motorway on stilts. At Charing Cross, apart from the Mitchell, everything ...”

“... the name of Thatcher to reverberate round the planet. As I know from close-quarters experience of James Callaghan on Devolution, Ted Heath on the miners and Michael McGahey, Harold Wilson on Rhodesia and Harold Macmillan on Profumo, occupants of 10 Downing Street can come to see the world in highly personal and in ...”

“... of whether or not BP smoothed Aliyev’s ascent to power is ‘a bit of a red herring’, says James Marriott of the campaign organisation Platform, co-author with Mika Minio-Paluello of The Oil Road (2012), the authoritative account of the company’s dealings in Azerbaijan. ‘The important point is how BP helped form a state that would assist in meeting ...”

“... since when did that really matter in crime fiction? – and sternly says that P.D. James’s Adam Dalgliesh, for example, ‘lacks verisimilitude as a policeman, if not as a person’. He also says rather oddly that ‘stories about a criminal, no matter how excellent they are in their own right, can never be as attractive as stories about a ...”

“... in an extended household with his family, his staff, and his lover and business manager, Jack Wilson. He was one of a number of homosexual men, among them Ivor Novello at Redroofs near Maidenhead, who found in a country house a way of living which, if it was not exactly open, was much less constrained than it would have been in Teddington. Tinniswood ...”

“... was more practical: he included useful remarks about sites and materials, and suggested his own St James Piccadilly as a good, economical model. But the two architects agreed on many things, in particular that the new churches should stand free and not be crammed into the tight, built-up corners many City churches occupy.On the whole the Commissioners followed ...”

“... one that includes Melville’s Benito Cereno, Werner Herzog’s film Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Wilson Harris’s Palace of the Peacock, a letter from Ignatius Sancho to Laurence Sterne, Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition and Gwendolyn Brooks’s Maud Martha – show that such books do exist. Still, she asks about J.M. Coetzee’s Foe: ‘Why not ...”

“... down-home cousin hoodoo, the traditions of the ‘Mardi Gras Indians’, Professor Longhair and James Booker and Sam Cooke and Jelly Roll Morton and a hundred other croaking, squeaking, grunting voices of the bayou, levée and gulf. Animal voices and fish voices and spirit voices: a graveyard full of ghosts, old and young, all trying to make themselves ...”

“... I remember The hyacinth garden. Those are pearls that were his eyes, yes! In other words, as G. Wilson Knight first pointed out in 1972, the ‘hyacinth girl’ was initially conceived as male and, like Phlebas, appears to have drowned, or so the section’s concluding quotation from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde suggests: ‘Öd’ und leer das ...”

“... University Library (and in a 1973 facsimile, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli). According to James West, editor of Trimalchio, the typescript of 27 October constitutes a completed version: ‘Naturally he expected to see proofs, and surely he planned to do some revising on them, but there is no evidence that, on 27 October, he contemplated major ...”

“... held in celebration of the conquest of Algiers.The Tortuous Streets of Arles: Henry JamesHenry James, visiting in about 1883, in writing about Arles, complains about the streets – he calls them ‘tortuous and featureless’ just as Murray in his Handbook, some thirty years earlier, had described them as forming ‘a labyrinth of dirty narrow ...”

“... Caliban’s withering speech on art’s place in society, pitched in the late style of Henry James where happy endings are in short supply. ‘We should not be sitting here now, washed, warm, well-fed, in seats we have paid for, unless there were others who are not here … others who have not been so fortunate.’ Near the end of his life Auden said ...”