“... still speaks directly to anyone who feels they are in the power of Mr Worldly-Wiseman, ‘my Lord Turn-about, my Lord Time-server, my Lord Fair-speech . . . Mr Smooth-man, Mr Facing-bothways, Mr Any-thing; and the parson of our parish, Mr Two-tongues’. These visionary caricatures ...”

“... Waterstone’s conducted a poll to find the ‘Book of the Century’ in 1997, the winner was The Lord of the Rings (The Hobbit was 19th, just ahead of L’Etranger, and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was 21st, just pipping The Trial). When the BBC’s The Big Read invited viewers to vote for their favourite novel in 2003, The ...”

“... fate of becoming an accessory to the life of a more important writer. It is his friend Henry James who keeps Sturgis’s novel distantly in view, at the same time as casting a long shadow over it. James read it in proof, and wrote a characteristic sequence of letters to Sturgis about it, beginning with neat praise and ...”

“... O’Brien, Maurice Gee, Brian Moore and Andrew O’Hagan, have made a big effort. Others, such as James Joyce, have managed to weave religion into a larger fabric, with all the sheer drama of faith and doubt, and have managed also to include the comic possibilities of dogma and ritual to liven up their books. In Ulysses Leopold Bloom, in musing on the use of ...”

“... Union during the devolution campaign of the late 1970s, Trevor-Roper had taken the title of Lord Dacre of Glanton, and had left the Regius Professorship of Modern History at Oxford for the mastership of Peterhouse, the oldest and most conservative college in Cambridge. His years at Peterhouse (from 1980 to 1987) were far from happy. An ultra-reactionary ...”

“... of the most caricatured figures in the golden age of caricature, he was relentlessly attacked by James Gillray, who showed him farting, fornicating and, the ‘f’ word Prinnie dreaded more than any other, ‘fat’. The ‘Prince of Whales’ arranged for Gillray to receive an annuity of £200, whereupon the cartoons stopped. I Object casts its net ...”

“... The abduction and murder of James Bulger, a two-year-old boy from Liverpool, has caused unprecedented grief and anger. Hours before the two ten-year-old boys accused of the crime arrived at South Sefton Magistrates’ Court, a large, baying crowd had formed outside. As a pair of blue vans drew up, the crowd surged forward, bawling and screaming ...”

“... it has since simplified its corporate structure and that it pays tax in the UK. Its current CEO, James Tugendhat, cousin of the Tory politician Tom Tugendhat, says it’s important ‘to be seen as having a transparent structure’, perhaps because ‘we are the only major provider seeking to make local authority care the core of our operating model.’The ...”

“... Henry James met Rupert Brooke on a visit to Cambridge in June 1909, having been invited there by some young admirers who made him feel, he wrote in a letter, ‘rather like an unnatural intellectual Pasha visiting his Circassian Hareem’. Brooke, in a white shirt and white flannel trousers, took charge of a punting trip on the Cam ...”

“... Helen, she proposes to get on with the job of analysing a specific text. She chooses, first, Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. With scholarly precision she compiles from previous critics a long, sad list of interpretations not warranted by the text. She then enters the labyrinth herself and finds that it is a maze of mirrors (beginning with the ‘long ...”

“... by the judging committee. Seriousness goes with choice: significance of specification. Henry James knew nothing of the world of political correctness, but he did insist on the novel being taken very seriously, the significant subject duly chosen, and fleshed out. The result, in his own case, could become a dull though brilliantly intelligent novel like ...”

“... James Wilcox’s charming comedy is set in rural Louisiana, among people who read the Bible in an engagingly amateurish way, associating religion with the conventions about drinking and dancing enforced by their anxious parents, and sometimes tempted to ‘modernise’ their lives, while still seeking God’s guidance ...”

“... academic writings on the 19th century state are rewarded with an entry of nine lines, the same as Lord John Russell who was merely in office at the time. This is three lines less than Bonar Law, dubbed by Asquith as the unknown prime minister, which proportionately must make Russell practically unheard-of. Such are the revenges of history, or at least of ...”

“... Gunter’s house over against Temple gate’, crossed the Thames to watch a play performed by the Lord Chamberlain’s men – Shakespeare’s company, though we cannot say whether he was among the performers – at the Globe Theatre. On the previous day, or possibly the day before that, a group of them had approached ‘some of the players’ and asked them ...”

“... at the LSE by some of my younger friends: The party was graced by the presence of Michael Foot and Lord Blake. Soon afterwards Robert Blake struck me off his visiting-list because I had opposed the witch-hunt at the British Academy against Anthony Blunt. I am glad to record that Blake has now forgiven me, or perhaps he thinks I have purged my offence. At any ...”