“... Stead seems to have been misremembering or paraphrasing a line of Virginia Woolf’s about Henry James) grew out of D.T. Max’s post-mortem profile of Wallace for the New Yorker, and is very much the version of his life as seen from Times Square. ‘Every story has a beginning and this is David Wallace’s’ is Max’s first sentence. It’s a funny way to ...”

“... In ‘Margaret Fuller Drowned’, a sonnet of the early 1970s, Robert Lowell, whose ancestor James Russell Lowell had been skewered by Fuller’s pen more than a century earlier, sums up what’s commonly known about Fuller. ‘You had everything to rattle the men who wrote,’ he begins, addressing her as ‘the first American woman?’ (emphasis on the question mark ...”

“... Copland, Carlos Chávez, Charles-Albert Cingria, Lord Berners, Auden, Isherwood, Spender, Edward James, Kopeikine (Balanchine’s pianist) e tutti quanti – surely reflects his relationship with his brother.’ But the claim that Walsh avoided ‘accurately informed people who knew Stravinsky well, such as Elliott Carter’ is odd when Carter is among the ...”

“... Not really, Edwards thinks. Can the journal be described, as the historian James Clifford argued in a famous essay in 1981, as ‘ethnographic surrealism’? Hardly. Was Leiris really in pursuit of the exotic ‘black Edens’ he had glimpsed with the arrival of jazz in Paris after World War One? Pretty much: they led him to Africa in ...”

“... Ben Elliot. Starmer’s former chief of staff, Sam White, went to Flint Global, where his boss is James Purnell, who served as a minister under Gordon Brown. Flint claims to offer its clients – which include Meta, Amazon and Uber – ‘unparalleled insight into how Labour thinks and works’. The former home secretary Jacqui Smith was a specialist partner ...”

“... Anthology had seen off the rival Oxford Anthology, produced by heavyweight academics including Frank Kermode and Harold Bloom, and the deep histories of English and British culture were being re-scripted. A revised edition of the Norton Anthology commissioned a translation of Beowulf from Heaney, and David Damrosch’s Longman Anthology of British ...”

“... until seven weeks after the story was published, and then only after the direct intervention of Frank Mulholland, the lord advocate, Scotland’s most senior prosecutor. Caldwell’s mother was disappointed when told the new inquiry might take two years. It was very complicated, they told her. It was going to take time to have all the conversations from the ...”

“... story of the atomic bomb began in 1932 at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, with James Chadwick’s discovery of the neutron, a particle the size of the nucleus of the lightest atom, hydrogen, but without its positive charge, thus making it electrically neutral. Chadwick’s discovery led Enrico Fermi in Rome to irradiate many different ...”

“... I’d written about another recent film, Bernardo Bertolucci’s Besieged (an adaptation of James Lasdun’s story ‘The Siege’), which was somehow rated PG. Much of the time I spent with my parents was in foyers and auditoriums across London, and on the journeys there and back. My mother was the more regular companion, my father the more ...”

“... Odd Man Out, which was released in 1947. Bethnal Green masquerades as an expressionist Belfast. James Mason is an IRA gunman on the run. Twenty years later, his Hollywood career in decline, Mason returned once more to an East End of smoky pubs, dark shadows, charity hostels, to narrate a documentary version of Geoffrey Fletcher’s The London Nobody ...”

“... her influence seems very local, mostly confined to the New York poetry of John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara or the writing of Andy Warhol, though in fact so much of Hemingway’s manner of writing – the short, paratactic sentences, the use of repetition, the idea of removing the obvious subject – was taken from her, so the whole sequence of writers ...”

“... fondness for 1980s bands like The Smiths is best understood, his biographers Francis Elliott and James Hanning suggest, as a mutation of county philistinism rather than a populist affectation.* His social liberalism, when not merely the product of good manners, seems to be a recent acquisition, while his mind-broadening PR job at Carlton TV was, Elliott and ...”

“... part is the Irish word dáire, meaning ‘wooded island’. The London prefix dates from 1613 when James 1 granted a charter to the Society of Governors and Assistants, London, of the New Plantation of Ulster, known then and now as the Honourable The Irish Society. The Hon. The Irish Society was strictly a business proposition, like the East India Company, and ...”

“... On Hoxton Square, if anyone cares to notice it, is a blue plaque for the local physician, James Parkinson, who identified and described the neurological disease that carries his name. But now, with ever increasing speed, the memory traces of market gardens, madhouses, priories, holy wells, 19th-century radicalism, are being wiped out by the new ...”

“... turned to the important question of whom to blame. The initial target was the director of the FBI, James Comey, who in July had refused to indict Mrs Clinton, but criticised her use of an insecure email server while she was secretary of state. A few days before the election, Comey gave notice of another possible violation only to clear her again. A more ...”