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“... understood its meaning. We are just beginning to find out, through the work of historians like James Hevia and others exploring the political arrangements in East Asia at the time when British imperialism started to intrude, quite how flexible, practical and efficient a world without abstract notions like sovereignty could be. While we take control of ...”

“... Several​ of the last century’s finest non-fiction writers – Joan Didion, Susan Sontag, James Baldwin – longed to be novelists. In interviews with the Paris Review, each touched on the tension and insecurity involved in their dual métier. Sontag wrote in surprisingly aspirational tones of ‘the novelist [I’d] finally given myself permission to be ...”

“... to her idiosyncratic form of writing, one with ‘no contact with the real world at all’, as Frank O’Connor disparagingly put it. Born in New Zealand, she spent all her time in London and Germany and France just getting by, struggling with lack of money and poor health, writing in beds and bedsits, out of suitcases and in overnight hotels and all the ...”

“... the NSA. The programme was called SHAMROCK, and it persisted until the late 1970s, when Senator Frank Church started investigating the NSA’s activities, declaring them to be potentially intrusive on the lives of ordinary Americans. Church’s high-profile investigations led to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, a law which seemed to give ...”

“... raised uncomfortable questions. She was more at home debating ideological niceties with Hugh James, who ‘took up the orthodox Bolshevik position … that I should not think in analogies as it was dangerous … he is excellent fun to argue with.’ Non-Oxford people were less satisfactory. The ‘hearty old couple’ the troupe stayed with near Water ...”

“... for Bush, Nader became a scapegoat for Democrats. ‘I will not speak his name,’ the strategist James Carville said. Nader himself remained unmoved; he ran again in 2004 and 2008. Along with these quixotic campaigns, he continued to sponsor citizen groups with agendas ranging from protecting Americans with disabilities to filing tort claims against ...”

“... was the scene of a ‘strange and recurring tragedy’ which provided the point of departure for James Frazer’s anthropological classic, The Golden Bough. The grove was guarded by a wary figure, a priest and a murderer, ever on his guard against an assailant who would try to murder him in order to take his place: ‘Such was the rule of the sanctuary. A ...”

“... ear and with a grease spot on his vest, who refuses to engage either in intellectual chat about James Joyce or religious debate about the identity of God. A bird-shaped stain on the ceiling above Asbury’s bed assumes the role of spiritual catalyst at the story’s conclusion, tearing ‘the last film of illusion’ from his eyes and bringing him face to ...”

“... truth is the point of language too. For Collier and Fielding – influenced by their close friend James Harris, author of a 1751 treatise on ‘language and universal grammar’ – words possess revelatory powers, elucidating ideas which would otherwise remain dark. Words aren’t abstractions from or mystifications of the external world but intimately tied ...”

“... Met Service in Dublin, who shared it with the Allies in London. The next day, the meteorologist James Martin Stagg’s team of forecasters identified a break in the storm on 6 June, a narrow window of opportunity over the Channel that would allow the landings to begin.* German forecasters, without any access to Atlantic weather stations, didn’t know the ...”

“... her, it seems, without a biddyish dilation on the carnality of her themes. ‘Maude Hutchins,’ James Kelly wrote in 1955, does ‘as she pleases’ as a novelist and ‘to date what has pleased her most is s-e-x as observed and enjoyed from the feminine vantage point.’ Hutchins, Maxwell Geismar said, was a writer who went about ‘describing casually all ...”

“... Ancient initiation rites and schizophrenic delusions. Freud, of course, but also Bergson, William James and Count Keyserling. Mandalas, yoga and the I Ching, plus warnings to the Western mind about becoming too deeply immersed in Eastern practices. Archetypes, psychological types and, regrettably, racial types. Wotan until the reader is woozy. And we are just ...”

“... Williams, who knew Orwell and later wrote of him much more resentfully, he was ‘brave, generous, frank and good’. Despite being chronically sick and temperamentally standoffish, he was astonishingly engaged and industrious; in one year he produced an article every two or three days, and Taylor provides us with the surreally useless bit of information that ...”

“... furniture, and didn’t calm down until a doctor arrived and injected her with a tranquilliser. James McCord, head of the plumbers, the White House unit which broke into the DNC Watergate offices, who had been a bodyguard to the Mitchells, later said that she’d been kidnapped.In Haldeman’s diary, Martha in the summer of 1972 was as big a problem for the ...”

“... of unguarded speech. ‘The tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity,’ warned the Apostle James. ‘The tongue can no man tame; it is an unruly evil, full of deadly poison.’ Dabhoiwala points out that the saying ‘while sticks and stones may break my bones, words can never hurt me’ is first recorded only in 1862, but the contrary ...”