“... a professor of English literature at Virginia Tech, has been preparing to write Crane’s life for more than twenty years. In that time he has published three volumes of basic source material, the first two with Stanley Wertheim, another Crane scholar: The Correspondence of Stephen Crane (1988) and The Crane Log (1994), a 450-page chronology which imposes ...”

“... during the darkest period of his mourning. The volume includes letters to Joseph Priestley, Thomas Lawrence, John Thelwall, Samuel Parr (‘the Whig Dr Johnson’), the great liberal advocate Thomas Erskine, R.B. Sheridan, Charles James Fox, the novelists and dramatists Elizabeth Inchbald, ...”

“... In this case,​ the elephant is the room. There can be few enormous subjects more often dodged than the space we occupy on the surface of the earth. Land ownership – its many modes, its distribution, its history – is the great ignored in politics today, gingerly taken up if at all and quickly put down again in favour of more fashionable topics: capitalism, urbanisation, democracy, industrialisation, the role of the state ...”

“... excitement, though many jockeys have experienced the thrill of winning an important race. Many more people have experienced the thrill of ‘losing it’ in a club, but equally few could re-animate the joy of it in somebody else. Soldiers don’t necessarily make the best writers about war, and a novelist’s knowledge of the world he describes may have ...”

“... the rejector and the benefits it provides to other individuals, taken one at a time. (I’ll say more about what this means below.) Scanlon’s theory was fully developed in his book What We Owe to Each Other (1998) and extensive commentary and criticism have grown up around the work. The book also incorporated ideas about the problem of freedom and moral ...”

“... Or for a Thatcherite tract on Britain’s decline from Victorian values. Or for a great novel like Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks. The rise and fall of a mercantile dynasty is a rich old subject, and can be approached from several angles. Which will Simon Blow’s be? ‘If I was more Tennant than anything else,’ he ...”

“... coffee houses and taverns. A blue plaque commemorates Dryden, but on the wrong house. At No. 9, a more accurately sited plaque marks where, in 1764, Joshua Reynolds and Samuel Johnson founded the Literary Club, or simply the Club, which met weekly to dine in an upstairs room at the Turk’s Head until the landlord died and the dinners moved elsewhere. The ...”

“... that has characterised my other short-term collecting crazes – the great Scottish civil engineer Thomas Telford. To be more precise, when out driving, I have been going out of my way to visit engineering projects he was involved in designing or building. I came across the most recent addition to my collection in early ...”

“... a hod.’ Post-war, he wanted to be a fire-tongued sage and seer, like his BBC colleague Dylan Thomas. MacNeice worshipped Thomas and did not, we trust, live to read Dylan’s description of his work as ‘thin and conventionally-minded, lacking imagination and not sound in the ear’. MacNeice may not have known for ...”

“... first, The Debt to Pleasure (1996), begins: ‘This is not a conventional cookbook’ – a more interesting way of saying that it is an unconventional novel. And so we are introduced to Tarquin Winot: gastronome, aesthete, snob, psychopath, and one of the most gloriously monstrous, deluded, hilarious, chilling characters to narrate an English-language ...”

“... on a smaller period of time’. Ideas for novels don’t come vaguer than that. He promised ‘more definite plans’ soon. In October 1922, Fitzgerald moved his family (Zelda plus their two-year-old daughter, Scottie) to Great Neck, Long Island and over the next 18 months ‘my novel’ acquired a Midwestern background, a poor boy-rich girl theme, a ...”

“... be fed,’ says a ‘soft, worried’ voice. He assumes it must be a wrong number, and thinks no more about it. But it delays him long enough for him to encounter someone he otherwise wouldn’t have done – and so the chain of unintended, unforeseeable and far-reaching consequences continues. The action travels westward, moving from Japan to Hong Kong, a ...”

“... and artists sometimes trample, burn or mutilate it, but in the post-9/11 years dissenters are more likely to fly the flag than besmirch it. Protesters against the war in Iraq, adopting the slogan ‘peace is patriotic,’ often carry the flag; and two years ago advocates of immigrant rights, many of them non-citizens, waved it in massive demonstrations ...”

“... But then, as luck would have it, since cold cases are all very well but an active murder is far more juicy, ‘the builder who put this place up’, Tony Curran, is found bludgeoned to death in his kitchen, and the club sets to work solving the crime with a little help from a couple of the local plod, PC Donna De Freitas and DCI Chris Hudson.Coopers Chase ...”

“... be empty, I find every street crammed with cars. Christie’s, too, is crowded, full of art-lovers more specially earnest than the general run so that something about the show repels – the homogeneity of the art-lovers, perhaps, their wholehearted worthiness and consistent middle-agedness. When I leave, the streets are full of disconsolate Roundheads and ...”