“... Hamlet marks the point of transition to the new dynamics of the reign of James. As the Prince increasingly uses the terms employed by artisans and the lower orders, he seems to commit himself to a language learned from the politically voiceless, and thus to become their mouthpiece. To the Court this signifies madness.Madness of a ...”

“... some way perceived to be intrinsically harmless. And at this stage she puts one in mind of one of Henry James’s minor characters, Mrs Carrie Donner, who was reported to be ‘wild’. ‘Wild?’ muses James’s surrogate silkily. ‘Why, she’s simply tameness run to seed.’ Not so Dr Tarnower, rich and celebrated ...”

“... From His Teens’, Melville intrudes directly to caution the reader – much in the manner of Henry James in Portrait of a Lady, on behalf of the romantically youthful Isabel Archer – not precipitously to judge someone destined to suffer unduly. Paragraphs in which his characters are allowed to exult in their situations tend to conclude with ...”

“... Christie or an Elmore Leonard. The formula is simple, repeated with variations in most of M.R. James’s 33 ghost stories, and still guaranteed to give pleasure today just as it did to those fuddled dons and sleepy schoolboys who first heard James read them by the light of a single candle in the provost’s lodgings at ...”

“... On 23 January 1894, Henry James entered in his notebook two stories told to him by Lady Gregory, whom he had met first in Rome 15 years earlier. She had given one of them to him, he wrote, as a plot, and ‘saw more in it than, I confess, I do myself’. ‘At any rate,’ he went on, ‘Lady G.’s story was that of an Irish squire who discovered his wife in an intrigue ...”

“... James Purdy​ ’s literary career comes with its own creation myth. He had been making no headway until in 1956 Edith Sitwell read a privately printed book of his stories and, ravished, threw herself into finding him a publisher and an audience. In one version of the event, Don’t Call Me by My Right Name, the book Purdy sent from America to Italy, made the last stage of its journey supernaturally, materialising by Sitwell’s bedside when she woke from a nap ...”

“... suggest that long-range interchange was necessary to keep culture going. This kind of interaction, James Shreeve suggests in The Neanderthal Enigma, explains much of modern human behaviour, especially the tendency towards notions of tribal self-definition. Neanderthals did not range far from home, so never developed similar links with their own kind. As Robert ...”

“... on a large floor slab in the chapel of Eton College is a memorial to a former provost, Sir Henry Wotton, who died, aged 71, in December 1639: ‘Here lies the first author of this sentiment: The itch of disputation is the scab of the churches. Inquire his name elsewhere.’ Izaak Walton was the first to pursue this prompt to biographical appraisal in ...”

“... of dealing with social paralysis and national demands. They were both haunted by the spectre of James Joyce. Borges was, he proudly wrote in 1925, ‘the first traveller from the Hispanic world to set foot upon the shores of Ulysses’. But this is not entirely true. Instead he was, as he admitted, one of the first of the hordes who had read the novel, but ...”

“... They were to be echoed a quarter of a century later upon a no less memorable early death, that of Henry Prince of Wales, the heir not only to the throne but to Sidney’s role of lost Protestant leader. No one mourned Sidney’s passing more profoundly than the best qualified and most influential of those imaginative early biographers, Fulke Greville, whose ...”

“... One of the odder political books I have read is The Abuse of Power, by James Margach, the veteran lobby correspondent of the Sunday Times. Published in 1978, the book was subtitled with a flourish: ‘The war between Downing Street and the media from Lloyd George to Callaghan’. For 40 years and more, Margach had enjoyed the confidence of prime ministers ...”

“... and colleague of Edwin Chadwick, who found his match in the equally expansive (canon-wise) James Crossley – a more cautious and cunning operator, the extent of whose activities as a corpus-sweller has not been fully apparent until now. Furbank and Owens suggest that Chalmers was both accident-prone and obstinately credulous – witness his eager ...”

“... threaten to blow his cover. He, too, having had his job stolen, is on the run. When Eliot wrote of Henry James that ‘he had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it,’ it was not altogether clear what James’s mind would have had to be like for this to be true. Eliot’s strange, virginal ...”

“... Dream of Spring, in his elegant little plays and in A Nest of Ninnies, the novel he wrote with James Schuyler, have more in common with those of the French aesthetes Bachelard and Blanchot. One of the good things about Ashbery is that he never seems in the forefront of the fashion. Three Poems, not one of his more successful works – prose poems are not ...”

“... compulsions but with its own impulsion. Mrs Trilling turned upon Mailer T.S. Eliot’s praise of Henry James as having a mind so fine that no idea could violate it: ‘Of Mailer we can say that his novelist’s mind is peculiarly violable by idea, even by ideology.’ But the greatness of The Executioner’s Song is, surprisingly, in Mailer’s having ...”