“... and Sidmouth. There were fellow poets such as Felicia Hemans, Tom Moore, Samuel Rogers, Sir Walter Scott and Robert Southey; artists of various kinds including the gifted amateur Sir George Beaumont, Francis Chantry, John Constable, Thomas Lawrence, James Northcote and John Soane; and from the theatre, Jack Bannister, George ...”

“... Ernö Goldfinger or the LCC’s Architects’ Department, but also that of Lutyens, Giles Gilbert Scott, Charles Holden and lesser lights such as Edwin Cooper or W. Curtis Green. Practically every Georgian terrace they can find features in the book. They disapprove of the City’s ‘untidy and expanding cluster’ of skyscrapers, and are more pleased with ...”

“... at least to outsiders, and a place where murky deals are done; the Wall Street Journal reporter Scott Patterson called his recent book on automated trading Dark Pools, even though it isn’t really about dark pools. But a more specific reason for their higher profile was the announcement on 25 June 2014 by Eric Schneiderman, attorney general of New ...”

“... the creation of the CIA. Without Fleming, Cockburn wrote on the fiftieth anniversary of the first James Bond novel, ‘the Cold War would have ended in the early 1960s. We would have had no Vietnam, no Nixon, no Reagan and no Star Wars.’ As adjutant to Britain’s chief of naval intelligence, Lieutenant Commander Fleming undertook a secret mission to ...”

“... translation, and like many people really did think of it as the standard edition. Like the King James Bible, if I can use that unfortunate analogy, it is so good – or we have been so educated to see its goodness – that it seems like the real thing. It’s true that I wondered, when Penguin first phoned me, whether Freud sounded different in other ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Scottish Language (1808), in the 1920s, and Edwin Muir’s refusal to fall for it, as codified in Scott and Scotland, published in 1936. Gibbon’s position is different from both. His Scots has a source in spoken language, recognisable to me as what emitted from faces I knew by firelight in my childhood, too: tormented, coarse, folk, brave, fine in the first ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”