“... splayed, and listen to Romantic music on his elderly record-player. The reticent passion of Edward Elgar was the sound of my childhood, the sound of the Malvern hills in summer (though I’ve never seen them, in fact), the valleys as gentle as stomachs, the fatherly oaks with their green brains, and the grass flattened by the shoes of walkers – all ...”

“... the American and British political systems; others still devoted to writers and artists – Goya, James Baldwin, Updike, Greene, George Eliot and, alas, P.G. Wodehouse. None of the essays is uninteresting and many of them have the virtues of the best kind of journalism – they tell you things you did not know and are unlikely to find out in more conventional ...”

“... that Manley omits to mention. For despite the ethnic tones of the local clubs, of which C.L.R. James has left us such a fascinating record, West Indian teams were by definition multiracial from the beginning. Whites may have been expected to lead, but white and black players played as equals in representative matches – unlike the gentlemen and players of ...”

“... to a pamphlet: a print-off of an address given by Quentin Bell in May 1976 – his fifth Gwilym James Memorial Lecture at the University of Southampton. I recommend the pamphlet, titled ‘A Demotic Art’. It told me, learnedly and amusingly, just what I wanted to know about the ‘coroplasts of Boeotia’. (The nearest my Shorter Oxford Dictionary comes ...”

“... women stifled by trauma, sexual hypocrisy and desperation could remain patients for life. Alice James suffered continuous hysterical symptoms and died at 43, rejoicing that she had got a disease that would kill her. Talks with a Viennese nerve specialist could only have helped. About a third of Freud’s Women is taken up with the professional women who ...”

“... sustained an internal injury occasioned by a strain while batting. In the melancholy death of James Creighton there is a warning to others.’ The American public exploded at the news, and one of the consequences was that baseball became firmly established as America’s national pastime in the years leading up to the Civil War. Then, during lulls on the ...”

“... decision-making to the practical needs of the financial situation of the family’. Indeed, James Prichard devised the category of ‘moral insanity’ as a diagnosis (an ‘ambiguous modification of insanity’, he called it) expressly tailored to the needs of wealthy families keen to deprive relatives who were troublesome, but not insane by the usual ...”

“... Protestants; Ruth and Jonah in Southern Swahili (spoken in the region of Zanzibar), translated by Edward Steere (1828-82), Zanzibar, 1868, and Saint Matthew by the same translator, London, 1869; Saint Matthew in Susu (spoken in French Guinea, West Africa), probably translated by J.H.A. Dupont (a West Indian of African descent, from Codrington ...”

“... novelist worth catching up on and following, in the wake of and on a level with the likes of James Buchan, Tessa Hadley and Edward St Aubyn. The four books are distinct – there’s no real overlap to speak of – but possess the sort of shared traits that a reader likes to find in an author, and an author in ...”

“... the same subject. As well as the two Milibands, Balls and Cooper, Jacqui Smith, Ruth Kelly, James Purnell, David Cameron and William Hague all went to Oxford and read PPE. The exceptions to this rule are George Osborne (Oxford, history), Boris Johnson (Oxford, classics), Michael Gove (Oxford, English) and a few, like Andy Burnham, Chris Grayling, Nick ...”

“... And though William McFeely won a Pulitzer Prize for his Grant (1981), that did not deter Jean Edward Smith from publishing a massive new Grant (2001), which some politicians have been reading with furtive pleasure because it finds that Gilded Age Administration less corrupt than had been believed. The Conservative pundit Richard Brookhiser gave us ...”

“... not alone. Eleanor Marx joined the Ibsen campaign and translated Enemy of the People into English. James Joyce adored Ibsen’s irreverence and laboriously studied Norwegian in order to read his work in the original. The Norwegian bourgeois families populating Ibsen’s plays talk of adultery and suffer from an assortment of diseases, including syphilis. There ...”

“... is still somehow Anglican, but an ecumenical Anglican. A representative Catholic equivalent is James McConica, with his specialised study English Humanists and Reformation Politics under Henry VIII and Edward VI (1965), followed by his recent excellent short general book in Oxford’s Past Masters series. For a general ...”

“... literary types to muscle in on rather more weighty matters than insect imagery in the later James. Spivak, by contrast, has a proper scorn for such ‘culturalism’, even if she shares a good many of its assumptions. She does not make the mistake of imagining that an essay on the figure of the woman in A Passage to India is inherently more threatening ...”

“... Edward​ Long arrived ‘home’ in the ‘mother country’ in 1769 with his wife and three young children after 12 years as a planter in Jamaica. His return presented no problems. He was a colonist, a ‘freeborn Englishman’, welcomed back to ‘his’ country. His wife came, as he did, from an elite white dynasty and his children, though they were born in Jamaica, inherited his birthright ...”