“... Physics. The story of his life and science, apparently an ideal subject, is a potential nightmare. James Gleick’s Genius, published in 1992, was faulted by some of Feynman’s friends for not capturing the playful side of Feynman’s personality; others complained that the book’s avoidance of mathematics made for an anaemic rendering of the ...”

“... bawdiness (‘fancy him, darling?’): the effect is rather like Arthur Balfour voicing Sid James. ‘Enter toge,’ Chapter 1 begins, ‘wheeled slowly in by French and German ladies of vague conditions in life.’ Or: ‘he himself rated success in flesh to include dogs, rain rope, and also a certain condition of Asiatic elation.’ Or: ‘art ...”

“... rejected, and at some point in 1705 or early 1706, he left Scotland. ‘There is no evidence,’ James Buchan writes, ‘he ever returned.’ Law was born in 1671, the son of William Law, a master goldsmith who, like other goldsmiths of his time, drifted from metallurgy into finance, becoming a lender to clients. Success ...”

“... The potter William de Morgan, finding himself at the age of 65 without a studio, decided not to look for another but instead to change his trade and become a novelist. Not so long ago the lucky and the cunning were picking up de Morgan tiles for a song, but it is altogether otherwise with his novels. Almost nobody seems to have picked them up for at least half a century ...”

“... the old family home of Fieldhead on the Thames. It is an autumn or winter evening after tea, for James the butler has been in to draw the blinds and close the curtains, and my father is reading under a green-shaded lamp. He has said a good deal already – the little boy who wants to be like his father, the sheltered child who doesn’t need to know the ...”

“... first novel, The Swimming Pool Library (1988), is set during the summer of 1983. The narrator, William Beckwith, is a young aristocrat of leisure. He lives in Holland Park, swims at the Corinthian Club, a gay gym on Great Russell Street (‘the masterpiece of the architect Frank Orme, whom I once met at my grandfather’s’), and picks up men ...”

“... leadership of Shaftesbury unsuccessfully tried to exclude King Charles II’s Catholic brother, James, Duke of York, from the succession. Locke’s First Treatise was also a response to the posthumous publication in 1680 of Patriarcha by the early 17th-century royalist Sir Robert Filmer, which claimed that absolute monarchy derived from the paternal ...”

“... Lewis Grassic Gibbon, and it didn’t seem as though they were pulling in opposite directions (as James Leslie Mitchell, his real name, Gibbon was, after all, a socialist internationalist). For the rebellious, rebellion was still an individual, not a corporate activity; not the rebel as Mel-Gibson-as-William-Wallace plus ...”

“... on Lee Harvey Oswald in Libra merited attention. There is at least one known case. In 2013 William Vollmann wrote about getting hold of his own FBI file and discovering that during the 1990s, following an anonymous tip, he was suspected of being the Unabomber. ‘UNABOMBER, not unlike VOLLMANN, has pride of authorship and insists his book be published ...”

“... rather as an early difficulty that had to be overcome – one of the Union’s teething troubles. James McPherson, who has spent most of his academic life in the study of abolitionism and the related struggles of the Civil War era, has written a narrative history that comes as close to being both comprehensive and definitive as seems possible in a single ...”

“... in intelligence,’ he says magnificently. ‘I’m after the truth.’ The colonel has a nephew, William ‘Skip’ Sands, who also works for the CIA, and who is also based in the Philippines. His uncle sends him on a mission up country, ‘his first official operation as an intelligence officer’, to investigate a suspect American priest called Father ...”

“... of 1707 was not the first. Another society was founded under Elizabeth I. But her successor, James I, ‘took a little Mislike’ to it and it fizzled out. Charles I made the antiquary Robert Cotton close his famous library, thinking it seditious. Suspected at various times of anti-Stuart sympathies, closet Catholicism, republicanism, even as late as ...”

“... gallows, as is clear from this volume of last speeches edited by the indefatigable Irish historian James Kelly. The speech from the gallows, along with the sermon, the sectarian pamphlet, the tall tale, the statement from the dock, the denunciation from the church altar and the address from the hustings, are among the most venerable of Irish literary ...”

“... were well received. Ask the Dust disconcerted some of its reviewers, but Bandini was admired by James Farrell and Steinbeck praised Dago Red. Italian and Norwegian translations were commissioned, Bandini was published in London, and Hollywood optioned both novels. Then, for various reasons, nothing happened. Distracted by a lawsuit brought against them by ...”

“... of their own aspirations – despite modern prejudices against absolute monarchy and murder. James Mackay, for example, prefaces his own account of the Queen with similar remarks about her current significance: I make no apology for offering this fresh look at Mary. Writing in the aftermath of the devolution debate and referendum, I have been forcibly ...”