“... purposive, energetic-sounding verb ‘moved into’, is meaningless unless it is explained that William Golding’s The Paper Men was a late, and lame, novel of remarkable thinness by an old famous author about being a famous author. It was metafictional only in the way that reality TV is metatelevisual. Stevenson never reflects on a writer’s aesthetic ...”

“... Relief, rather than mourning, greeted Gloriana’s passing; and all eyes turned to Scotland and James VI. Back to Basics, however, did nothing to resolve the structural problems of English government. The issues which had increasingly dogged Elizabeth’s later years – the decline in royal revenue, the falling value of Parliamentary subsidy, the running ...”

“... of the King Edward potato, adding perfunctorily that it was not ‘an eating potato’. Henry James would have seen the point. In 1870 he wrote to his elder brother William from Malvern, England, where the hotel fed him mostly on mutton and potatoes, to say how much he missed ‘unlimited tomatoes & beans & peas ...”

“... which is notable for its lavish attention to the social and cultural life of objects. In novels by William Dean Howells, Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, Kathleen Thompson, Henry James, Edith Wharton and others, the encounter with technology is a small step taken, often regardless, on a journey defined by an ever-shifting ...”

“... Immediately after the declaration of war in September 1939, my father, James MacGibbon, volunteered to join the Royal Fusiliers and was commissioned as a second lieutenant. Openly a Communist, he was disobeying the Party line (the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact had decreed it a ‘capitalist war’), but James was not in any doubt ...”

“... Charles James Fox was early hailed as ‘the phenomenon of the age’: an Infant Phenomenon like his chief opponent and perfect foil, William Pitt, who, Fox’s mother is said to have predicted, would be ‘a thorn in Charles’s side as long as he lives’. David Hume, encountering Fox at 16 during one of his formative visits to Paris, was startled by his intellectual power and maturity and already foresaw him as ‘a very great acquisition to the publick’, if the lure of a life of cosmopolitan dissipation, already strong on him, did not distract him ...”

“... in a London gallery, there’s more to it than a shared interest in contemporary art, as Henry James explains with just a faint smack of the lips. ‘It wasn’t, in a word, simply that their eyes had met; other conscious organs, faculties, feelers had met as well, and when Kate afterwards imaged to herself the sharp deep fact she saw it, in the oddest ...”

“... to him, as it did to many of his fellow countrymen. They had recently rid themselves of a monarch, James II, who had shown unmistakeable absolutist tendencies. For Defoe, the Revolution had been Glorious indeed. His opposition to the doctrine of divine right shaped all his political views. Jure Divino was designed to be a work to do justice to a lofty ...”

“... away from her and died of pneumonia in a rural stationmaster’s house a few days later. Although William Nickell and the contemporary Russian journalists whose work he has explored for The Death of Tolstoy try to make an enigma of the 82-year-old writer’s ‘complex and provocative’ nocturnal flight from his ancestral home, the count had been brooding ...”

“... to the widespread use of Blair’s Rhetoric in the United States. By the early 1760s, the Scotsman William Small was teaching Rhetoric and Belles Lettres to Jefferson at William and Mary. By 1768 John Witherspoon from the Laigh Kirk, Paisley, was basing his Princeton lectures on Blair’s Rhetoric. In 1781 Wither spoon ...”

“... In his memoir, Burning the Days (1997), James Salter tells a story about an encounter between William Faulkner and an officer from the local airbase in Greenville, Mississippi in the early 1950s. They talk of the excitement of flying, and Faulkner drunkenly reminisces about his days as a pilot in France during the First World War ...”

“... was a side effect of excessive public spending. Neoliberal economists such as Friedman and James Buchanan argued that hippies and activists would soon be brought into line if they were given a dose of financial responsibility, by having to pay tuition fees, for instance, or the debt on a mortgage. Alternatively, if their parents were forced to pick up ...”

“... form of sublimated fandom of the more traditional kind.’ Trump is one result of this. Similarly, James Meek has observed of Jacob Rees-Mogg thathis career shows how much like sport British politics has become, where politicians have fans and supporters, rather than voters who are swayed by their arguments or troubled by their extra-parliamentary ...”

“... began to give way to interiority: it became a psychic injury, a ‘thorn in the spirit’, as William James put it, an injury done not to the body but to the mind by violence, or by any unspeakable or unassimilable experience. In the 19th century and much of the 20th these mental wounds were understood to be represented in the body by such symptoms ...”

“... I turned her attentions to the Earl of Essex. George Villiers, first duke of Buckingham, told James VI and I that what they enjoyed together was ‘more affection than between lovers in the best kind’. Lucy Hughes-Hallett wonders, in her biography of Buckingham, if chiefs of staff or special advisers can be understood as favourites, but really there is ...”