“... Rider Haggard were responsible for his lifelong interest in Africa. But for most children today, James Stephen’s prophecy of a time when ‘The Rudyards cease from kipling, and the Haggards ride no more’ has now come true. If these older historical novels are no longer read, is a new generation of writers getting over an equally vivid sense of the ...”

“... that Cage has noticed something of interest in a great literary text. The revelation is that James Joyce used the ten letters of his name, in their own order, as a concealed motif throughout the composition of his book. A literary scholar might simply have noticed the ploy, identified a few instances, made some appropriate comment and passed on: but ...”

“... there was a partial, temporary and gingerly link-up, initiated by Virginia Woolf; and all along James Strachey, born to be Bloomsbury but in love with Rupert Brooke, functioned as a sort of inter-coterie courier. So it’s easy to get confused, and although, like most generalisations, Delany’s compare-and-contrast exercise is contestable on this or that ...”

“... word means ‘betray’. Yet of the 44 times paradidomi occurs in connection with Judas, the King James Bible erroneously translates it as ‘betray’ on all but four occasions. So a single mistranslation has done much to perpetuate the idea that Judas was a traitor, made him a scapegoat instead of a participant in the action of ‘saving ...”

“... sketches his portrait, Hemingway is a fellow war correspondent, and Paris brings a meeting with James Joyce. His wartime boss at Naval Intelligence is, of course, Ian Fleming, who sends him to keep an eye on the Duke and Duchess of Windsor in the Bahamas – and so on. In his opening preamble Mountstuart announces that he has made ‘no excisions designed ...”

“... in 2015, it was mended with the Fresh Start Agreement. The then first and deputy first ministers, Peter Robinson and McGuinness, issued a joint statement signalling ‘our resolve to engender the sea change so longed for by our communities’. The reference was to Seamus Heaney’s The Cure at Troy, in which ‘hope and history rhyme’ and there is ‘hope ...”

“... Men – they put on The Tragedy of Gowrie, a dramatisation of the attempted assassination of King James by John Ruthven, earl of Gowrie, in 1600. It was doubtless based on the official account, The Earle of Gowries conspiracie against the Kings Maiestie of Scotland. James encouraged frequent reprints of this pamphlet, and ...”

“... house in the International Settlement, with a bathroom for every bedroom and ten servants. James and Edna’s social life seems to have consisted of the grim expat cliché of endless rounds of bridge and too much gin. Their lives hardly intersected with those of Shanghai’s millions of Chinese inhabitants. Ballard’s attempts to befriend the son of ...”

“... quote, something concrete. We use Hazlitt to advertise and illuminate other writers and artists. Peter Marshall does so in his new biography, William Godwin. Hazlitt’s vivid account of Godwin’s political importance appears on the first page of Marshall’s introduction, and his worthy book is studded with variations on ‘as Hazlitt rightly ...”

“... Peter​ Thiel is known for so many different things it can be hard to keep up. He co-founded PayPal, which provided the basis for his early fortune as well as Elon Musk’s. He is the eerily prescient angel investor who helped launch Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook on the path to global domination. He is the man who bankrupted Gawker, the online gossip site, by funding Hulk Hogan’s libel action, fulfilling a decade-long vendetta that started after Gawker outed Thiel as gay ...”

“... saying how pointless and infuriating it was that the better writers – whom we may as well call James Kelman, Alasdair Gray and Tom Leonard among others – wouldn’t join in on the song. ‘It’s their loss,’ she said. ‘I mean, what do they want?’ A fairly good idea of what they wanted could be gleaned at that time from a visit to the Scotia Bar in ...”

“... man. Altogether an appropriately ambivalent emblem, one might think, for the vicissitudes that James Boswell would experience throughout his life, and the turbulence of his reputation since his death. It was not just a case of the man’s temperament being volatile and manic, his daily memoranda to himself shifting suddenly from ‘You got up dreary as a ...”

“... famous aesthete-sleuth – polo player, expert in Chinese ceramics, former student of William James – whom Raymond Chandler regarded as ‘the most asinine character in detective fiction’, and on some level that’s probably the point. (‘I’m not Sherlock Holmes or Philo Vance,’ Marlowe says later on.) Even so, it’s surprising that Marlowe ...”

“... his father died. Synge makes an attempted parricide the theme of his Playboy of the Western World; James Joyce describes in Ulysses how Stephen Dedalus, disowning his own parent, searches for another father. Portrait of John Stanislaus Joyce by Patrick Tuohy (1923) Just as Oscar Wilde began to become himself the year after his father’s death, when he ...”

“... Castle, a plain inscription remembering him as ‘Servant to Queen Elizabeth, Councillor to King James, and Friend to Sir Philip Sidney’. Greville’s life of Sidney, written in the earlier part of James’s reign, is a study in failure. ‘He never was magistrate, nor possessed of any fit stage for eminence to act ...”