“... even lowering the lane outside his house to protect himself from view. It’s a subject that James Moore has made particularly his own, providing the definitive account of Darwin’s fears, phobias and life options in his lynchpin essay in The Darwinian Heritage. The Darwinian Heritage is a richly-detailed volume, daunting in size. It contains 31 ...”

“... or Amours de Voyage. But McEwan’s crucial jettisoning is of the name Venice. When Henry James, a hundred years ago, set himself to be yet another lauder of Venice, he launched himself immediately from his title ‘Venice’: ‘It is a great pleasure to write the word; but I am not sure there is not a certain impudence in pretending to add anything ...”

“... the border the old Roman road – now the A140 – which heads north from Ipswich towards Norwich. James Bettley, who has already revised Essex, is responsible for the expansion. The Buildings of England series has left Penguin for Yale University Press, who have both overseen the third edition of the series and continued with the new volumes of Buildings of ...”

“... at it like rabbits the night after they exchanged vows? The Dukes of Burgundy and of Orléans? King Malcolm and Earl Tostig? Probably not, but who knows? At the other end of the timescale, Anne Lister certainly did do it with the woman she exchanged rings with, as previously with her intended from whom she caught a venereal disease: gotcha! Returning to ...”

“... group of ‘inhabitants of ye moon’. Their faces are symbolic objects – a guinea for the King and a Jew’s harp for the bishop – while beside them a lady and gentleman, or rather a teapot and a periwig, engage in a tête à tête. This, Uglow points out, is still the language of the emblem book, where images stand, hieratically, for ideas. By ...”

“... readers would never have accepted them, as they did, as being completely convincing. Henry James, who admired the bogusness of his brilliant young friend, had long since spotted the paradox involved, and often comically sighed over it. It made him distrust biography as well as the graphic sort of fiction, and by implication relate the two. He embarked ...”

“... Irish referred to the ‘English’ then rather than the ‘British’, a term favoured by James I but not by his English subjects, who in those days rejected it as firmly as the Scots, Welsh and Irish reject it today.) We can guess what Kipling felt about the founding of the Irish Free State, always referred to by Honor Tracy, herself aggressively ...”

“... rhetorical style is modelled on the Rat Pack’s favourite comedian, another Don – Rickles, the king of insults. He’s been pretty good at it: ‘Little Marco Rubio’, ‘Low Energy Jeb Bush’, ‘Birdbrain Nikki Haley’ doomed them in the primaries. But Kamala Harris had him flummoxed. He tried recycling some of the old Hillary Clinton epithets ...”

“... I left the village where I’d spent the night, the village where, in the ninth century, a famous king had beaten the army of a northern warlord. I climbed a steep path to a high plateau and walked along dusty tracks. There was gunfire in the distance. In the early afternoon I rested on a hilltop, on the ramparts of ancient fortifications whose shape was ...”

“... the Anglo-American appetite for dirt. He had known for a while that an American biographer, Dean King, was on his case, and had told his friends to give King nothing. But Fenton’s and the BBC’s revelations forced King to show his hand in a piece for New York magazine, a speculative ...”

“... little ease’ for his disobedience to its commands. Witherley applied to the court of King’s Bench in London for a writ of habeas corpus so that they might investigate the reason for his detention. The court issued the writ, but nothing happened. So it sent a second writ addressed to the jailer, Hunnyngs, along with an attachment for contempt ...”

“... Genji would find him a bore.) Not that the book is to be read as a feminist tract, or (as Clive James resonantly declares on the cover) ‘a voice for a new generation of adventurous women’. The stories as a whole are singularly lacking in the aggression or combativeness that such a summary might imply. If they make a common claim on behalf of women, it ...”

“... in 20th-century America has been Saul Bellow, who stands in relation to this theme rather as Henry James did in relation to the impact of Europe on American consciousness. The mourning of old Europe (Europe before the slaughter) and old America (America before Burger King), and the attempt to establish a continuity between ...”

“... that Corinne Weston’s emphasis on the emergence of ‘the co-ordination principle’ between king, lords and commons after 1642, is shaped at least in some degree by the need to seek out an ancestry for the separation of powers. By contrast, Joyce Appleby’s essay is valuable in large part because it stresses what was un-English about the 18th-century ...”

“... rounds that he might be restrained by an ‘axis of adults’: Tillerson, as secretary of state; James Mattis, as secretary of defence; and John Kelly, Trump’s chief of staff. Bolton wants to place himself outside this particular axis. He blames his colleagues for the administration’s chaotic lack of process, and for engaging in ‘transparently ...”