“... It is a long time​ now since any undergraduate class used Mill’s An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy, first published in 1865, as a set text. But it has happened. George Santayana, who graduated from Harvard College in 1886, has described in Persons and Places the teaching of Francis Bowen: But Harvard possessed safe, sober old professors also and oldest of all, ‘Fanny’ Bowen ...”

“... Heren, the veteran foreign correspondent, had hoped to become editor of the Times in succession to William ReesMogg, when Rupert Murdoch bought the newspaper. Heren was told that, at 61, he was too old. Under Harold Evans he failed to flourish (‘Evans trashes me, to use the US Army expression, and most of my former colleagues in his book Good Times, Bad ...”

“... is eager to proclaim an evangel of some kind, and therefore must be aggressive. A story in William Trevor’s new collection, The Hill Bachelors, treats these themes in a surprising but apposite way. ‘Of the Cloth’ describes the declining days of a Church of Ireland clergyman, the Rev. Grattan Fitzmaurice, rector of the mountain parish of ...”

“... II of France declared her not only queen of Scots (as she had been since the death of her father, James V, when she was six days old), but queen of England and Ireland too. The show includes a sketch of Mary’s ‘false arms’ – French, Scottish and English arms displayed together on a single shield – that Throckmorton sent from France to Elizabeth’s ...”

“... 1894, and began by announcing the death of the author. Its lead item was a short story by Henry James in which a celebrated writer, Neil Paraday, is pursued by a crew of souvenir hunters and salon-frequenting harpies. ‘The Death of the Lion’ is narrated in the first person by Paraday’s nameless, self-appointed protector, a journalist sent to poke ...”

“... stop teaching. Gabriel, the eldest and always the favoured one, continued as an art student, but William, the younger brother, had to give up the idea of being a doctor and take a post in the Excise; it seemed that Maria and her young sister Christina would have to become governesses. In fact Christina never did, but the prospect was grim, and the secure and ...”

“... It isn’t often that the public gets to see that James Bond is alive and well and still has his licence to kill. On 22 March last year, Gerald Bull, a Canadian scientist with a US passport, a wife back home and a mistress in Belgium, was shot dead outside his Brussels apartment with five shots from a silenced 7.65mm pistol ...”

“... Dr McIntosh has said bluntly that it was ‘at no time’ a ‘typical English community’. Until James I started to listen to those who preached retrenchment, the Crown was an exceptionally undemanding landlord. The Crown’s inertia as a landlord is familiar, but Havering had the further peculiarity of being ancient demesne, which meant, among other ...”

“... readers would never have accepted them, as they did, as being completely convincing. Henry James, who admired the bogusness of his brilliant young friend, had long since spotted the paradox involved, and often comically sighed over it. It made him distrust biography as well as the graphic sort of fiction, and by implication relate the two. He embarked ...”

“... to defend herself against her. Her rout – in the city of many previous literary defeats, from James himself to Ian McEwan – is a reversal that brilliantly catches up and concludes the various narrative strands that the novel has so deftly kept in play. Initially we have been led to assume, as Rachel herself does, that she is in control and reliable, but ...”

“... time Thomas Hardy arrived in the city, already trained as an architect whose sympathies lay with William Morris (‘we are only trustees for those who come after’), the rebuilding of Rome, now the confident capital of Italy, had torn away the ancient fabric, leaving no space for accretions, whether of flora or of association. The shaggy figures of ...”

“... the streets of Islington. Three years after that it became a public-private initiative, with James I underwriting half the costs in return for half the profits. In 1631, Charles I was persuaded to swap equity for debt, a deal that proved most unfortunate for the Crown. Thereafter, the enterprise contrived to stay private for most of its long ...”

“... from St Elizabeths in 1958, and then, in 1967, his extensive and fascinating correspondence with James Joyce. But it wasn’t until the 1980s and 1990s that the archive floodgates really opened. These decades saw the appearance of volumes individually devoted to Pound’s letters not only to fellow writers such as Wyndham Lewis, E.E. Cummings, Ford Madox ...”

“... they sold the news. No, as it happens, we are not talking about the Sun. We are talking about William Randolph Hearst’s Journal. The war is against Spain rather than Argentina, and it is April 1898 rather than April 1982. But we might just as well have been talking about the Sun. Like the Journal, it is a paper that makes up stories, manufactures ...”

“... Magdalen College was founded in 1458 by William Waynflete, a farmer’s son who became the bishop of Winchester and chancellor of England, and so endowed the college as to make it the richest in Oxford or Cambridge until the foundation of Cardinal College (renamed Christ Church after Wolsey’s fall). It did no harm to Magdalen that Wolsey, who was one of its fellows, himself became Henry VIII’s chancellor ...”