“... 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 ...”

“... was of little use to Barker. Recalling her first encounter with Henry James, she said that although she couldn’t ‘understand everything’, she felt she was being taken on ‘a profound emotional journey that went beyond mere comprehension’. Not that she’s entirely averse to comprehension. The position espoused by Jen in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... predecessor is lost – the first ever detective story or civilised thriller. The drama critic James Agate, who once savagely described Donald Wolfit’s Hamlet as a private detective watching the jewels at the Claudius-Gertrude wedding feast, may have said more than he knew. Yet to praise Hamlet as the first detective story makes sense mainly in terms of ...”

“... Ireland in the 1950s, a place not altogether unlike the white-ruled South Africa evoked in the frank confessional of David Schalkwyk’s opening chapter. In the apartheid world, the young Schalkwyk ‘was defined legally, socially and … psychologically as a “master”’, even as the material realities of bondage were masked (and painfully ...”

“... status of photography, which in many versions of its power and its responsibilities has what Henry James, in another context, called ‘a fatal cheapness’. Arbus was ready to deal with that in full knowledge and with full consent. She approached her responsibilities to the art of photography with a mixture of irony and neediness, dark laughter and dead ...”