“... claimed to have the world’s longest bar – 101 stools – and hosted the likes of Ulysses S. Grant and the Vanderbilts. It had burned down, he was told, ‘a year or so ago’. On 11 May he inspected the site: Old bedsprings twisted with heat; puddles of molten glass; washbowls that had fallen through to the foundations; a flight of stone steps leading ...”

“... this and some of that – a little Muhammad Ali for straight sex, some Kissinger for savvy, Cary Grant for looks, Jack Nicholson for entertainment, plus André Malraux or some Jew for brains. Commonest fantasy there is.’ So common, in fact, that it has already been given an outing in Mr Sammler’s Planet: ‘he fetched back, for example, a statement by ...”

“... to finish her degree, and fearful that her marriage would mean the withdrawal of her Fulbright grant, got Ted to stay away. Poetry took her love poems: a good omen. ‘We shall be living proof that great writing comes from a pure, faithful, joyous creative bed. I love you; I will live like an intellectual nun without you; I need no one but you,’ she ...”

“... on Irish radio in 1995 and published in The Great Irish Famine: The Thomas Davis Lecture Series, James Donnelly remarked thatthroughout the rest of the Famine years, the Gregory clause or ‘Gregoryism’ became a byword for the worst miseries of the disaster – eviction, exile, disease and death. When in 1874 Canon John O’Rourke, the parish priest of ...”

“... His Teens’, Melville intrudes directly to caution the reader – much in the manner of Henry James in Portrait of a Lady, on behalf of the romantically youthful Isabel Archer – not precipitously to judge someone destined to suffer unduly. Paragraphs in which his characters are allowed to exult in their situations tend to conclude with dropped hints of ...”

“... to do, and where could they go from here? ‘Supervisors at the IRS’s regional complex in Lake James township are trying to determine why no one noticed that one of their employees had been sitting dead at his desk for four days before anyone asked if he was feeling all right.’ Perhaps Wallace was writing toward paradise, where the forms are also ...”

“... same kind: it was adopted during a brief period when Britain had neither a king nor a Parliament (James II having first dissolved Parliament and then fled), by an ad hoc convention which offered William of Orange the Crown, accompanied by a Declaration of Rights which the convention, endorsed the next year by a lawfully summoned Parliament, passed into law as ...”

“... the Registration of Criminal Tribes and Eunuchs of 1871, drafted by no less a legal luminary than James Fitzjames Stephen. This enabled the authorities to categorise ‘a tribe, gang or class’ as one ‘addicted to the systematic commission of non-bailable offences’, and thus as a ‘Criminal Tribe’. In 1871 a mere four tribes were so labelled, though ...”

“... bright day that brings forth the adder, And that craves wary walking. Crown him that, And then I grant we put a sting in him That at his will he may do danger with. Th’ abuse of greatness is when it disjoins Remorse from power; and to speak truth of Caesar, I have not known when his affections sway’d More than his reason. But ’tis a common proof That ...”

“... important political thinkers do not really belong in this club of international superstars. One, James Madison from Virginia, is more than just a superstar in the United States. He is one of the secular gods of the American Republic, the architect of its Constitution and the author of many of the Federalist Papers written in its defence, including ...”

“... words of Gerry Canavan, who in 2013 became the first scholar to open them. Butler had been reading James Lovelock and thinking about what would happen if humans migrated to other worlds while continuing to be ‘part of an earth organism in some literal way’: ‘phantom-limb pain’ was a phrase she used in the notes in the boxes. ‘A somehow neurologically ...”

“... 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 as ...”

“... in 1927, then under the protection of the League of Nations, and like Charles Dickens, Jan Neruda, James Joyce, Theodor Fontane and his acknowledged exemplar Alfred Döblin, he places his native city at the centre of his creative imagination. Grass’s best work so far is given over, again and again, to its evocation: a very special piety ties him to the ...”

“... unilateralism come from the internationalist wing of the Republican Party (Brent Scowcroft, James Baker) rather than from the Democrats or the Left? Samantha Power and David Halberstam did not set out to solve this riddle, but they have unintentionally provided an important part of the answer. Power was motivated to study the history of disappointing US ...”

“... to Lebanon’s Christian heartland in 1991, with the approval of Kissinger’s successor, James Baker – a quid pro quo for Syrian participation in the American war to expel Iraq from Kuwait in 1991. When I reminded an American diplomat in Damascus that the US had given a double benediction to the Syrian occupation of Lebanon, he said: ‘That ...”