“... his new ballads, Morgan writes about real monsters – Burke and Hare and the poisoner Madeleine Smith – there is black comedy, but no attempt at fellow-feeling. By making his 21st-century demon so likeable a spokesman for alterity, Morgan has avoided glorifying murder, but he has also bleached out something of the potent otherness of the demon’s ...”

“... you won’t know about how she came to be your mother. Colin, you see, knew a man by the name of Graham, a good bridge player, and someone I saw quite a bit in the old days. He captained several teams, including the England team, at the major tournaments, and after he’d picked Colin for one of these events – I hasten to add he’d picked me before he ...”

“... are reminded, ‘Malthus was as much the successor to Abraham Tucker and William Palcy as to Adam Smith, and as much the contemporary of someone like Bishop Sumner, who did so much to make his doctrines acceptable in Anglican circles, as of his friend Ricardo.’ Macaulay, on the other hand, is to be visualised, as he so often visualised himself, addressing ...”

“... In​ 1926, Graham Greene received a diagnosis of epilepsy. In all likelihood, he didn’t have the disorder. His only symptoms were three isolated episodes of lost consciousness: once in the school chapel at Berkhamsted; once in the London home of his psychoanalyst; and once in the offices of the Times, where he was working as an assistant editor ...”

“... and Price Waterhouse. Over Atlantic Computers, Price Waterhouse sued Touche Ross. Over Wallace Smith, KPMG sued Coopers and Lybrand. Over London United Investments, Price Waterhouse sued KPMG. Over Polly Peck, Touche Ross sued Coopers and Lybrand. Poor Coopers and Lybrand was in the soup more than once over its not altogether distinguished accountancy of ...”

“... in court because he felt an immediate bond with one of them. It was not just that he fancied Perry Smith, although he certainly did; when Lee saw Perry Smith, she thought: ‘Oh, oh! This is the beginning of a great love affair.’ Capote saw in Smith a powerful version of himself. Since ...”

“... an outburst of public indignation in Britain. When it emerged that the Home Secretary, Sir James Graham, had authorised the opening of Mazzini’s correspondence, he was attacked in Parliament for resorting to ‘the spy system of foreign states’ and Carlyle wrote to the Times that opening of men’s letters was ‘a practice near of kin to picking men’s ...”

“... now plain and not bright sister. The Promoters: A Novel without a Woman (1904) by William Hawley Smith    Tycoons have a plan to tilt the world’s axis, creating a real estate boom in Antarctica, by firing off a hundred thousand cannons in Nebraska. Other Eyes than Mine (1926) by Ronald Arbuthnott    Two Latin scholars, an Englishman and a ...”

“... speculates in a similar vein about the later and sunnier correspondence with the publisher, George Smith, whose evident pleasure in Brontë’s letters may partly have arisen, she thinks, from the artist’s capacity imaginatively to transform him with her pen, recreating him in a form cleverly designed to soothe his insecurities. Though Brontë’s teasingly ...”

“... just as we remain dubious about the value of the ‘decorative’ in the visual arts. When Graham Greene made ‘entertainments’ a separate category from the hard stuff in his production, he rammed home the point: the difference was a moral one, a difference between reading to pass the time pleasurably – that is, trivially – and reading to some ...”

“... for people to redeem themselves by their own efforts. The followers of Mother Anne Lee, Joseph Smith and John Humphrey Noyes were all, in different ways, antinomian perfectionists who considered themselves free to challenge or abandon existing norms (particularly sexual ones) and to create new ones based on their own idiosyncratic readings of ...”

“... that every £1 of legal aid expenditure spent on benefits advice can save £8.80. Recently, Graham Cookson and Freda Mold of the University of Surrey reviewed a number of studies from the UK and abroad, all of which found evidence of often substantial savings consequent on legal aid expenditure. The government was undeterred. During the passage of ...”

“... placid affair. On one matter Taylor has quite irresponsibly altered his views. In A Vain Conceit Graham Swift was enthusiastically welcomed as one of an emerging group of younger writers; in After the War Taylor remarks woundingly and in passing that ‘you and I might suspect that the new Graham Swift is tripe.’ That is ...”

“... use of self and anti-self. Previous critics have often taken too narrow a view of Gregory Smith’s emphasis on the tendency to combine opposites as a characteristic of distinctively Scottish writing. Buthlay is right to emphasise that this view of Scottish culture was important to MacDiarmid precisely because it suddenly made the Scottish cultural ...”

“... was distancing himself from Benton. Some time in the late Thirties he began to frequent John Graham, that most mysterious of all the gurus of European Modernism. Graham took him up, reinforcing his faith in unconscious imagery. From now on, Pollock transferred his admiration and his envy to Picasso, enlarging his ...”