“... 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 ...”

“... labouring to attain a modicum of reality. Not so much a dry David Hockney splash as Richard Wilson’s site-specific installation 20:50: his tank of sump oil, miraculously transubstantiated into this brilliant new substance, a liquid thicker than jelly but lighter than air. A seductive mosaic carpet across which you cannot walk without sinking. A slick ...”

“... resignation, there were two further, short-lived secretaries of state for war (Joseph Godber and James Ramsden). Within a year Harold Wilson’s incoming Labour government had abolished the post altogether, amalgamating its duties into the Ministry of Defence. Profumo killed off his job at the same time that he was ...”

“... without limit, and, lacking the certainty of a completed thing, will never entirely disappoint. James Agee had a fortunate career on the face of it, as a New York freelance for almost two decades and then as a screenwriter. One of the large talents of American writing in the 1940s, Agee was a Southerner, from Knoxville, Tennessee, who came North, stayed and ...”

“... item of dress. Heath at least deserves the credit for initiating the Think Tank. Even Harold Wilson, after some initial misgivings about an institution inherited from his predecessor, found some constructive work for it to do. For the Think Tank members, James Callaghan emerges as the premier for whom it was easiest to ...”

“... a shame, for his script would surely have been more lively than, say, his life of Woodrow Wilson. He has his due place in this book. But so does William James, rather a hero of Douglas’s, and rightly, though it cannot please feminists that he always ran away from home when his wife was about to give birth, and ...”

“... had on the foreign policy-making apparatus in Washington. President Bush, his Secretary of State James Baker, and dozens of top officials on the National Security Council and in US Intelligence, were familiar with Saddam’s brand of state tyranny long before August 1990. The Iranian Revolution, and with it the perceived threat to the Arab oil states of an ...”

“... unable to raise the revenue to pay the crews. After the Restoration in 1660, both Charles II and James II demonstrated enthusiasm and expertise in nurturing naval expansion. But the Royal Navy’s performance in the Second and Third Dutch Wars was uneven, and political and religious divisions among its officers and men enabled William III and the Dutch fleet ...”

“... purpose’ than as a brief hiatus from ‘algorithmic citizenship’ (as the artist and writer James Bridle refers to our profiling by FAANG, aka Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google). In his​ earlier work Paglen approached the security apparatus from afar; in his recent projects he attempts to get inside its mechanisms. In this he follows the ...”

“... in the Promised Land, Britain kept the promise made in 1917 by its Foreign Secretary, Arthur James Balfour, in the Declaration that bears his name, ‘to favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people’. While nurturing the ‘national home’, a term as deliberately vague as Palestinian ‘autonomy’ is today, Britain ...”