“... addresses the ‘immense darkness’ of the continent beyond. Another unnamed presence might be Mr James, whose list of the ‘items of high civilisation … absent from the texture of American life’ finds a counterpart in the hero’s observations. After mulling over James’s views in The Child that Books Built, Spufford ...”

“... the names of the 18 now known to have been killed: John Ashton, William Bradshaw, Thomas Buckley, James Crompton, Edmund Dawson, Margaret Downes, William Evans, William Fildes, Samuel Hall, Mary Heyes, Sarah Jones, John Lees, Arthur O’Neill, Martha Partington, John Rhodes, Joseph Whitworth, and two special ...”

“... shows how the ‘carnivalesque’ was harnessed to official ideologies under Elizabeth and James I. Terence Hawkes, Francis Barker and Peter Hulme (AS), and Paul Brown (PS), link The Tempest with the ideology of colonisation, arguing that the play’s formal involutions reflect, not transcendent truths about illusion and reality, but the ideological ...”

“... Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers, a law and order manifesto for a very nasty party. If Tom Jones had encountered this Fielding in his rambles round Britain, a longish novel would have become a short story. Tom’s sexual transgressions were matters for the ecclesiastical courts, but he was a poacher, an idler unwilling to earn his living by regular ...”

“... the latest leaflet, or procuring another drink. And there were the Americans. I remember James Fenton noticing how they would cluster a little closer together and talk in a fashion slightly more intense. Mainly Rhodes or Fulbright scholars, they had come from every state of the union with what amounted to a free pass. The Yanks of Oxford were ...”

“... contains a passage germane here: ‘A play of Shakespeare’s and a play of Henry Arthur Jones’s are essentially of the same type, the difference being that Shakespeare is very much greater and Mr Jones very much more skilful.’ This explains a lot when Updike criticises Degas’s ‘unevenness of ...”

“... on such issues as Dickens and Ellen Ternan, Hardy and Tryphena Sparks, Trollope and Kate Field, James and his obscure hurt. So when Monica Jones follows Philip Larkin’ s request by burning his diaries do we feel resentment because the destruction will set an eternal gap between reader and poem? Or is it something lower ...”

“... and Morrison published in Contemporary British Poetry: Douglas Dunn, Anne Stevenson, Craig Raine, James Fenton, Andrew Motion, Derek Mahon, Fleur Adcock, Carol Rumens, Medbh McGuckian, Penelope Shuttle and others. Geoffrey Hill, Dannie Abse, Denise Levertov, Peter Red-grove, U.A. Fanthorpe, Gillian Clarke, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Elaine Feinstein are all ...”

“... When he refers to Heidegger, he doesn’t mean the philosopher but the operatic impresario John James Heidegger (c.1665-1749). In Literature and Popular Culture in 18th-Century England, as in his Grub Street (1972) and its abridged version Hacks and Dunces (1980), he proposes to describe ‘how things were’ or how they seemed to be to the people who lived ...”

“... and the First World War’), F.H. Hinsley (... and the Use of Special Intelligence), R.V. Jones, the happy beam-hunter of 1940 and premier intelligencer thereafter (... and Science), Norman Rose (and Zionism) and Roy Jenkins (the Government of 1951-55) are predictably good. The uneven John Keegan (... ’s Strategy), though seemingly disqualified by ...”

“... press. Then chance played him an unpleasant trick. In 1794, he had smuggled to the radical printer James Ridgeway, in prison, a draft of his revolutionary drama Wat Tyler. It passed out of sight, to emerge, in 1817, from the firm of Sherwood, Neeley and Jones – ‘associated’, says Storey, savouring the mischief, ‘with ...”

“... the inexorable march of transnational capital.The Californian gold rush began in January 1848 when James Marshall, a US army veteran working at John Sutter’s sawmill on the American River, claimed to have pulled a gold nugget out of the millrace (other accounts credited the discovery to a colleague of Marshall’s called Indian Jim). Within a year tens of ...”

“... having run away from the domestic constrictions of Portsmouth, she had worked as a clerk at Peter Jones, then in the firm’s furniture-painting studio, then as a secretary at the Medici Society, then for MGM as a reader. She used this period, the mid-1930s, as material for the best of her novels outside the trilogies, The Doves of Venus (1955). ‘Stevie ...”

“... candidate for measurement) Fothergill says, ‘I think you must be Mr J.M. Barrie,’ to which Sir James, ‘slyly’, says: ‘You are not far wrong.’ Harold Acton, with his ‘Big Ben’ voice, presides at the last dinner of Oxford’s banned Hypocrites’ Club, which ends in much goat-like leaping about, the sort of conduct which would not have been ...”

“... however, that she was a double agent. The long-term lover of her married FBI ‘handler’, James Smith, she had used him to gain access to confidential files which were then passed on to the Chinese secret services; she had also become involved with the head of security at a nuclear weapons facility. (It’s thought that Leung tipped off Beijing about ...”