“... consistency in its application to their own sons. When Trench turned down the advice of head boy James Mackay and flogged a couple of seniors for staying out late, Mackay told his father, the Earl of Inchcape. Rough treatment of the appropriately-named Viscount Brocas caused dismay in the household of his father, Earl Jellicoe. I recall the outraged ...”

“... drowned. Anne Lister, in this as in much else, was an exception. She never ailed. As her uncle James, installed in melancholy grandeur in Shibden Hall, near Halifax, had followed the family pattern in remaining a bachelor, she found herself unexpectedly in line for the property. Lister proved herself the very woman to make the most of her good fortune. She ...”

“... as artlessness, so this abundance of autobiographical detail can easily be mistaken for frank comprehensiveness. ‘His biographers are saved the search for significance,’ G.D.H. Cole declared: ‘he has it all ready for them.’ Only close reading reveals that Cobbett hardly ever mentioned his mother. Or that his wife (who tried to kill herself ...”

“... notorious episodes of the double-helix story took place – the episodes that involved Crick and James Watson. Perutz’s role appears rather shady in Ferry’s account. As is fairly well known, Watson and Crick made use of unpublished data, from Rosalind Franklin’s rival group at King’s College London, in coming to their conclusions about the shape of ...”

“... critics of Lawrence have seen their task as something similar: a matter of showing him, as Frank Kermode put it, ‘taming metaphysic by fiction’. Part of Lawrence would have approved of this approach. He thought that all novelists of consequence (‘even Balzac’) had ‘a didactic purpose, otherwise a philosophy’, and that this was precisely ...”

“... Whig Dr Johnson’), the great liberal advocate Thomas Erskine, R.B. Sheridan, Charles James Fox, the novelists and dramatists Elizabeth Inchbald, Thomas Holcroft, Amelia Alderson, Mary Hays and Charlotte Smith, as well as Godwin’s publisher George Robinson and a number of dissenting ministers who, largely forgotten now, were important public ...”

“... words’. Freelancing at the New Yorker, she did her best to shock Ross, who, according to James Thurber, had ‘an editorial phobia’ about ‘bathroom and bedroom’ stuff. ‘We damn near printed a newsbreak about a girl falling off the roof,’ Ross once confided to Thurber. ‘That’s feminine hygiene, somebody told me just in time.’ (On ...”

“... near each other as blind bodies can be in the same room’. Eliot had referred in 1918 to Henry James’s ‘merciless clairvoyance’ as a perception of relations rather than entities: ‘It is in the chemistry of these subtle substances, these curious precipitates and explosive gases which are suddenly formed by the contact of mind with mind, that ...”

“... if a hospital goes bust somebody takes up the slack. Lansley chose 19 July, the day Rupert and James Murdoch had the media transfixed with their testimony to the Culture Select Committee, to let slip that from next April a billion pounds’ worth of NHS services, including wheelchair services for children and ‘talking therapies’ for people suffering ...”

“... of Christina Wayne and grew dependent on the Walking Dead franchise, whose original showrunner, Frank Darabont, sued them for misappropriated profit share and won a $200 million payout. Darabont had been fired from the show halfway through the filming of the second season, and AMC was putting pressure on the cast not to speak to the media. The actors, an ...”

“... soup.’ When I asked Petri about the audience for his online political analyses, he was frank: it was young, urban liberals. And yet in an indirect way, he and Adamescu hoped to reach the more socially conservative, economically dissatisfied part of society by encouraging their audience to treat that part of Romania with understanding rather than ...”

“... we do a double-take. Occasionally, there is a flash of recognition. ‘It seemed to me,’ Henry James wrote to the critic and campaigner for homosexual rights John Addington Symonds in 1884, ‘that the victims of a common passion should sometimes exchange a look.’ The common passion James referred to was for Italy ...”

“...  Henry James​’s novel The Princess Casamassima, which dramatises the world of stray revolutionaries in London in the 1880s, depends on energy coming from opposites. The novel’s protagonist, Hyacinth Robinson, appreciates beauty and feels excluded from the world of privilege around him. He lives an interior life ...”

“... in ‘an extravagant, eye-catching green robe, bought for him, in Tunis she thought, by his Aunt Frank on his first transatlantic trip’. Elective affinity was everything. As Williams said of Pound: ‘It took just one look and I knew it was it.’ Their relationship had a note of comedy in it: ‘He was impressed with his own poetry,’ Williams ...”

“... The Persian Jacket, off the wall of the gallery and back with him to MoMA. (Her close friend Frank O’Hara, working at the museum’s front desk, was there to see Grace’s official entry into the museum; the painting fitted into the cab, but not through the revolving doors, and had to be taken in through a side entrance.) She was the first of her ...”