“... called Curzio and a girl of 13 called Lucrezia. They were left much on their own, without a Henry-James-type governess, and since Curzio was a smart and well-read youth wanting to raise his profile in the family by getting publicly noticed, they were looking (or Curzio was) for some headline-hitting coup. One hot afternoon they took a boring walk down to the ...”

“... Frank Norris’s novel The Pit is set; Studs Lonigan’s street corner on the South Side from James Farrell’s trilogy; the block of South Drexel where Bigger Thomas in Richard Wright’s Native Son killed and incinerated his rich employer’s daughter; Nelson Algren’s Division Street; the train station where Louis Armstrong was met by ...”

“... One day in 1950 I walked down Crown Passage, an alley between King Street and Pall Mall, to call on the Falcon Press in pursuit of money they owed me. The managing director Peter Baker had left letters unanswered and telephone calls unreturned, and sure enough he was out. I saw instead a harassed long-nosed man in a blue suit who said his name was Paul Scott, and that he was the company secretary ...”

“... with stories to tell. In 1896, in the newly founded capital of Addis Ababa (‘new flower’), King Menelik II granted a gasha of land to each of the superpowers – Britain, France, Italy and Russia – camped on his doorstep. A gasha is about 36 hectares, or 90 acres. The Russian patch has long since been split up and the Italians had some of theirs ...”

“... wrote a titillating and entirely untrustworthy account of working as a governess to the family of King Mongkut of Siam, The English Governess at the Siamese Court (it became the basis of the 1956 musical The King and I, featuring Deborah Kerr and Yul Brynner at their sprightly best). Leonowens followed up this bestseller ...”

“... by her; G.H. Lewes in a rash moment called her the most remarkable writer of the century. Henry James, of all people, loved her ‘serene volubility’. It is not likely, he wrote, that posterity will travel with her novels in its trunk, but when they have gone out of fashion and are rediscovered in dusty corners of old libraries, the discoverers will ...”

“... Richard Ellmann’s​ biography of James Joyce was first published in 1959 to an almost unanimously enthusiastic reception. Ellmann’s editor at the New York office of Oxford University Press told him it was ‘the most ecstatic reaction I have seen to any book I have known anything about’. William Empson welcomed ‘a grand biography’; Cyril Connolly, though naturally disappointed not to find himself mentioned, nevertheless recognised something ‘truly masterly’; and Frank Kermode wrote that Ellmann’s account would ‘fix Joyce’s image for a generation’, a judgment that, as Zachary Leader rightly comments, was if anything an underestimate ...”

“... St John Vanderveld Montgomery, if you please), stout, blond, of some intellect and no substance, king of the expatriate castle on a Mediterranean island, carelessly finds himself owing money to one Señor Aguirre, a local ‘businessman’ given to irregular commercial practices like cutting people’s ears off. Somewhat startled by the realisation that ...”

“... with Chamberlain, Beatrice Webb and Milner) conspire with the Duc de Mersch (King Leopold of the Belgians) to ‘civilise’ Greenland’s Eskimos. The protagonist of the novel, Arthur Granger, is an aristocratic and unsuccessful novelist who betrays his own cherished chivalric ideals for the sake of a girl-agent from the Fourth ...”

“... section on adventures and mishaps, also includes A.A. Milne’s ‘Disobedience’, the tale of James James Morrison Morrison Weatherby George Dupree, who took great care of his mother, though he was only three. The mother, you will remember, disobeys James James’s order that she should not go down to the end ...”

“... trusting to luck. But now his energy was dwindling, and his luck. He’d found a hotel in King’s Cross, opposite the station. Room 12a (between 12 and 14) was on the second floor. You could look down and see all the people and the endless traffic and, as dusk settled, the winking cash sign on the amusement arcade just below. Here my father died. The ...”

“... books in his excellent library and met at his table such great men as Browning, Tennyson and Henry James. Gregory was regarded as a fair landlord, and it has been conjectured that this regrettably unusual reputation was later responsible for Coole getting off so lightly in the desperate days of the Civil War. He believed in Catholic emancipation, thinking it ...”

“... were lost in the world, they might all again be painted to the life out of the story of this king.’ To the 17th-century republicans Edmund Ludlow and Algernon Sidney, Henry would be ‘that monster of mankind’, ‘one of the most violent princes we ever had’. To Bolingbroke in the 18th century, Henry’s would appear the most ‘severe’ of ...”

“... mute are given a say in things,’ Kipling does not, of course, stop short at human beings. Henry James, who admired – indeed adored – him, deprecated this process nonetheless, and in a famous comment once observed that he had abandoned humans for horses, dogs, locomotives and parts of ships. Kipling did give a voice of sorts to all these, and by no means ...”

“... earlier, in 1611, in a decision known as the Case of Proclamations, it had been ruled that ‘the King by his proclamation or other ways cannot change any part of the common law, or statute law, or the customs of the realm … The King hath no prerogative, but that which the law of the land allows him.’ It gave a key to ...”