“... in Proust. Sex? A Dance gives full measure to the place of desire in human life. Powell credited James with ‘forcing, almost single-handed, the English novel into the status of a work of art’, but remarked that there he fell short; even The Golden Bowl was limited by a ‘chronically inadequate understanding of sexual passion as an element in human ...”

“... pronunciamentos’? I don’t know.‘It is often remarked that [she] is a difficult thinker,’ Scott and Finlayson begin their introduction to Marxist Modernism, adding the words ‘esoteric’, ‘ironic’ and ‘poetic’, one more ‘difficult’ and then ‘difficulty’, twice, and that’s just in the opening paragraph. Is it unfair of me to sense a ...”

“... one written with as much insight, rhetorical power and moral authority as The New Jim Crow. When James Forman, a law professor at Yale and the son of a prominent civil rights activist, first presented his criticisms of Alexander’s argument, colleagues nervously asked him why he was ‘critiquing a point of view that is so aligned with your own’. He ...”

“... curly wig’ – but she was paid for the story, and in another instance was convicted of perjury. James Kirchick, in Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington (2022), notes some of the ‘code words and allusive phrases’ that journalists once used to suggest that the ‘nation’s top cop was not the model of American masculinity and traditional ...”

“... 1943 – became the most decorated composer of his generation, ending up as Sir Michael Tippett OM CH CBE. He considered himself bisexual, but although he formed deep emotional attachments to women, including the writer Francesca Allinson, the composer Priaulx Rainier and Vaughan Williams’s widow, Ursula, the relationships were never fully ...”

“... the hour’, recommending with lyrical urgency that writers should instead ‘look within’, as James Joyce had begun to do in Ulysses, in an attempt to render the ‘myriad impressions’ received by ‘an ordinary mind on an ordinary day’. But ‘Modern Fiction’ is rarely read in context. On either side of it in The Common Reader, like the cladding on ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... fuel economy and the safety of drinking water. Trump’s first choice as administrator of the EPA, Scott Pruitt, soon after taking command, purged its website entry on climate change. (More than a year later, if you go to epa.gov/climatechange you are told the page is still being ‘being updated’ to ‘reflect EPA’s priorities under the leadership of ...”

“... of writers that included Amis, Larkin, Wain, Donald Davie, Robert Conquest and others. As J.D. Scott put it in the baptismal piece in the Spectator, ‘The Movement, as well as being anti-phoney, is anti-wet; sceptical, robust, ironic, prepared to be as comfortable as possible.’ Amis in particular had, as a later acquaintance put it, ‘this laser ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... fate. The centralisation is one of the principal things that attracts freebooting tycoons like Sir James Dyson and Sir Jim Ratcliffe, along with the press barons, to the Brexit cause. As Rupert Murdoch, always more candid than his fellows, once remarked, the trouble with the EU was that you never knew who to call.All of Oborne’s books have been published in ...”

“... on A.E. Housman as a classical scholar or his influential meditation on ‘The Ambiguity of Henry James’. In 1940 he published To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History, his account of the revolutionary tradition from Michelet through Marx and up to the Bolsheviks. This may look like the one among his works that was wholly ...”

“... Jane Welsh Carlyle, Froude’s posthumous My Relations with Carlyle, and Alexander Carlyle and Sir James Crichton-Browne’s The Nemesis of Froude. Everyone has long since taken sides, if not with the tactless first biographer or with the vindictive and family-proud nephew then with Thomas Carlyle or with Jane, or perhaps with Carlyle with reservations, or ...”

“... as a form? The stature of a writer, and length of life, might be expected to provide some co-ordinates. Yet even among modern masters there is little consistency. James died in his early seventies, Musil in his early sixties: Leon Edel and Karl Corino awarded them each two thousand pages. Kafka, who barely reached ...”

“... to be fitted lifeboats, the fizz of welding torches, the juddering of rivet guns. The shipyard of James Lamont and Co. bordered the castle on its upriver side. Downriver, and even closer, lay the Ferguson Brothers yard. The ships built at both yards were small – 300 feet long at most – and had humdrum ...”