“... Between​ the wars, the journalist Richard Usborne recalled in 1953, there was a feeling that John Buchan was good for you. ‘If not exactly the author set for homework, Buchan was certainly strongly recommended to the schoolboy by parent, uncle, guardian, pastor and master,’ he wrote in Clubland Heroes, a study of the thrillers he had enjoyed as a child ...”

“... captive along with Rachel and her son James were Elizabeth Kellog and Silas Parker’s children John and Cynthia Ann. John grew up to be a Comanche warrior, perhaps ending his life as a rancher in Mexico; Elizabeth was ransomed; Cynthia Ann became the wife of the war leader Peta Nocona and the mother of Quanah ...”

“... the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book?’ the British critic Sydney Smith had asked in the Edinburgh Review in January 1820. By this point, only around eighty American novels had been published, and the best known was Charles Brockden Brown’s macabre Edgar Huntley (1799), although Washington Irving’s collection of short ...”

“... director of the White Star Line, who according to the script insisted that the ineffective Captain Smith, emblem of Britain’s exaggerated sense of its seafaring skill, drive his ship at full speed through an icefield so it could set a transatlantic record that would push up his company’s share price, allowing him and his friends on the boat to profit by ...”

“... control their own fate: ‘We are out for life and all that life can give us,’ the revolutionary John Maclean said at his trial for sedition in 1918. George Square, 31 January 1919 My grandparents met at a Glasgow ILP branch sometime around the end of the First World War, and I’ve always had a rather romantic view of the party and of that ...”

“... the Trout Lakes, But this overlooks what may turn up at the fishery. As in the poetry of Stevie Smith, there is usually something nastier round the corner. With her penchant for juggling hawks and handsaws, while insisting on their difference, Hill appears rational in proportion to our bafflement. Juxtaposition is her strong suit, hinged sentences ...”

“... in this drama: the Imagists – H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), Richard Aldington, T.E. Hulme, F.S. Flint, John Gould Fletcher, Amy Lowell – as well as scores more who had a stake in the continuing vitality of literature, including Yeats, Lawrence, Ford Madox Ford, Wyndham Lewis and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. The writers, clustered in clubs or ‘gangs’, wanted to ...”

“... were entangled in various forms of aspiration, impersonation, interdependence and disguise. Stevie Smith, herself an odd bird passionately attached to a maternal aunt (though not in quite the same way), called them ‘that odd amalgam of aunt and niece’. ‘Amalgam’ nicely captures the competing elements that came to be known as a singular author, Michael ...”

“... Fall. They flicked through my record collection and asked me about the band’s frontman, Mark E. Smith, and his lyrics. ‘What is “mithering”?’ they wanted to know. ‘And what is “cash and carry”?’ Smith, Curtis and Morrissey created a version of Manchester that journalists and photographers began to define ...”

“... he might be the author of books on dynamic thinking: he was a 19th-century French philosopher. John Lancaster Spalding, with 52 entries, turns out to have been a 19th-century bishop of Peoria. Even some of the British names are none too familiar. Sir Arthur Helps, with 33 extracts from Essays Written in the intervals of Business, was – but, of course ...”

“... divisional court for the Government in 1982 in an initially successful attempt to deprive Mr Ron Smith of Leeds of his basic right to an inquest into the death of his daughter who had been found dead in strange circumstances in Saudi Arabia. The law at the time was clear – everyone had a right to an inquest into any dead body they brought to Britain. But ...”

“... I owe my years as a jazz reporter to John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, which made the British cultural establishment of the mid-1950s take notice of a music so evidently dear to the new and talented Angry Young Men. When, needing some money, I saw that Kingsley Amis wrote in the Observer on a subject about which he obviously knew no more and possibly less than I did, I called a friend at the New Statesman ...”

“... was an annex of manners. The triply-named bookman – Arthur Quiller-Couch, Arthur Clutton-Brock, John Cann Bailey – fumed or fawned for seven hundred inconsequential words and then retired to his club, where he could doze amid a cloudy consensus. At times intellectual life was more strenuous than that. May quotes from the diary of ...”

“... than the Whigs from the intolerable rectitude of the bien pensant. The austere righteousness of a John Stuart Mill, for example – the governess-figure of ‘Miss Mill’ in Judy’s Mid-Victorian caricatures – must have alienated many who clung to the belief that virtue need not debar one from all the cakes and ale of comfortable prejudices. Yet the very ...”

“... saw as ‘dull and heavy’, Cobbett could seem to an almost eerie degree a living embodiment of John Bull. This was how James Gillray represented him at the time; and it was also how he enjoyed representing himself. He was ‘an Englishman’, he boasted in 1795, ‘a calf of John Bull’, and the older he got, the more ...”