“... that a man born in Brooklyn and brought up in Ireland could be hanged as a British traitor for war crimes committed in Germany. William Joyce and James Joyce had their British passports in common. At least James’s literary nationality has never been in doubt, though this is scarcely true of his friend and compatriot Samuel Beckett. It would be ...”

“... really believe,’ he asks, ‘that Lloyd George, who invented the welfare state and won a Great War and created modern Ireland, put the making of a single bishop at the top of his list of achievements?’ It is the voice of sober realism. Canon Charles Pattinson, who had been Henson’s chaplain, finally persuaded Chadwick to take on the at first rather ...”

“... with Washington hostesses and maîtres d’. But outside in the streets is the American working class, that seething mob of muggers and minorities, locked in combat with cops, hard-hats, blue-collars, rednecks and even hillbillies, sinister as Salem witches. Of course, it’s only a motion-picture scenario: but Monimbo and The Last Supper do try to make it ...”

“... the fake artists, the sociopaths and string-pullers higher up, and the mass-murderers in war and peace’ whose inspiration and guidance have reputedly come from books of the sort listed in Kearney’s bibliography. ‘Beautiful or repellent, normal or perverse,’ says Legman, ‘erotic books are not and have never been the school of crime.’ He ...”

“... worked in the Nairobi brewery. Now, however, ‘the towns of East Africa contain many fat upper-class Africans; their leaders seen on television are often grossly obese.’ (Trowell suggests that obesity and the associated diabetes probably emerged as common disorders in the English upper classes in the late 18th century, when sugar was first reported in ...”

“... age of 17, along with her mother Phebe and thousands of others. Like so many women of her age and class who found employment in New York’s burgeoning stores, eating houses and cheap lodgings, she earned money by ministering to the needs of working men. In the four years she lived in New York, she also had a number of shadowy boyfriends. She had come to the ...”

“... lady there.’ Later, Nichols herself stands up to the Mob while working as a showgirl (‘You got class, kid’). Forthright on both race and gender issues, she insists on prosecuting and sending down a prominent lawyer for attempted rape (‘when a woman says no, she has a right to say no’). During her early film career, she and her friends tell off a ...”

“... than convention. An instructor at Santa Barbara used to demonstrate the point. He would come into class in his wet-suit, still goggled and dripping from the ocean. The attitude has been extended to all inquiry. Our conceptions are all we have. There is no point of view that is not someone’s point of view. All views are conventional, there is no firm ...”

“... was born in India. If the tales Leonowens told about herself were an attempt to acquire middle-class respectability, as Morgan plausibly argues, the tales she told about the women of Siam accorded them something like glory. Unlike The English Governess, which offers a more or less coherent narrative with Anna and the King as principal figures, The Romance ...”

“... paid well, which was a valuable bonus when one’s income fell to a shilling a day in time of war; and its prestige was such that merely to have written for it that week was enough to win over an otherwise hesitant officer-selection board. Today a boasted connection with the Al Fayed Punch would be no way to win military advancement. The reputation of ...”

“... and stops working. Most of the elements of Boyd’s other books turn up in Armadillo – scenes of war and surveillance, beaches, absent fathers, corpses, engaging hermetic lexicons – but it has more in common with The New Confessions, partly because in both the heroes take on not just an employer but, through him, a powerful ...”

“... really know about it? To Lucien, the recovering city comes to seem like ‘a school play about war profiteering’ or ‘a propaganda movie’. And the propaganda seems to have done its job, though Lucien, preoccupied with Bush’s wars, stops throwing glamorous parties at his gallery. Things have changed a bit since Eisenberg wrote about the consequences ...”

“... both senses of the word) George’s mother. Swift perfectly captures the reticent, lower-middle-class English tone of that generation when he has George recall: ‘Now and then they’d both mention, with a certain look in their eye, “Mrs Barrett’s place” – “Mrs Barrett’s place in Broadstairs”, as if Mrs Barrett was some guard dog they’d ...”

“... the Sublime, a victim of the need for a large, empty metaphor to redeem the disaster of the Boer War and to serve for the catastrophe to come. All sides maintain that he was a man of his time: for better he’s a hero, for worse he’s an incompetent villain, for the relativist he was what he could only be and no political or moral judgment applies. Scott ...”

“... concerning industrial strengths and weaknesses, its influence on nationalism and imperialism, on class warfare and xenophobia, on religious divisions and – as one rather feared – its role as a ‘defining occasion’ in the supposed search for a national identity. This can become heavy sledding. In his acknowledgments Auerbach pays tribute to a colleague ...”