“... when Jerry compares the Boston Tea Party to a Laurel and Hardy skit. This is the America, not of George W. Bush’s ‘Haves and Have Mores’, but of those who have little more than the clothes they stand up in: ‘Other bodies had clothes and possessions. All I had was – what the hell did I have?’ One thing Jerry doesn’t have is full citizenship in ...”

“... unemployed as gardeners). Usborne the indefatigable has resolved to read more of a writer called George Ade, who had a pretty turn of phrase and may have influenced the master. His Knocking the Neighbours (1911) contains the following:    He had a temperature of 102 and his ears were hanging down. Also, during the period of coma, someone had extracted ...”

“... chalkstones and liquid chalk’, as if from a burst pipe. The authors have spotted in a Sherlock Holmes story an old man ‘cram full of gout’ of whom it was said that he could chalk his billiard cue with his knuckles. Relief from gout was sought in many ways, often heroic, sometimes idiotic. The New Testament injunction ‘If thine eye offend thee, pluck ...”

“... The birth​ of Prince George obviates the immediate need for the Succession to the Crown Act 2013 which introduced gender equality into the line of succession. Section 2 of the Act addresses, though only in part, another outmoded form of discrimination: ‘A person is not disqualified from succeeding to the crown or from possessing it as a result of marrying a person of the Roman Catholic faith ...”

“... an arrangement of names and dates. Binyon looks at ‘professional amateurs’ from Dupin and Holmes to a whole assortment of private eyes – I’m not quite sure how they get amateur status, by being underpaid maybe; ‘amateur amateurs’ from various academics to Lovejoy; and a whole run of policemen: plodders, aristocrats, Maigret, the guys at the ...”

“... of the contributors do, however, engage Kermode’s thought in a fairly serious way: John Stokes, George Hunter and Patrick Parrinder. Two ways of doing so were possible. Either Kermode’s general view of the critic’s task or his ideas concerning specific texts or groups of texts could have been the focus of attention. Stokes and Hunter choose the second ...”

“... of overseas donors to register as ‘organisations with foreign support’. Shortly afterwards, George Soros’s Central European University was expelled from Hungary: Fidesz ran a campaign accusing Soros of conspiring to erase national identities and increase migration to Europe. (Orbán was happy to make an agreement with the Shanghai-based Fudan ...”

“... a kind of tea-break in the intellectual working day. An objection suggests itself, which is that George Orwell wrote about the ‘English national character’, and Orwell was not a man to write to no purpose. But consider what he wrote – viz. that ‘a profound, almost unconscious patriotism and an inability to think logically are the abiding features of ...”

“... turn up a letter that William Jefferson Clinton wrote, on 3 December 1969, to a certain Colonel Holmes of the University of Arkansas Reserve Officers Training Corps. Clinton wanted to clarify his attitude to the military draft:Let me try to explain. As you know, I worked for two years in a very minor position on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. I did ...”

“... are remarks like ‘the golden rule is that there are no golden rules,’ made by people like George Bernard Shaw. The Yale Book lists these under the names of their authors, along with brief indications of their provenance and reliability. Books of quotations are no longer sources of things you might want to say or cite – after all, you can Google and ...”

“... he wrote, and in the breast of every admirer. Invoking Milton’s Satan, or Napoleon, or George III (in a long and elaborate poem), Lowell does not so much identify with those persons as cause them to appear in a new light as Robert Lowell. Who else could they be? What else could the poets and poems taken over in Imitations be? It is significant that ...”

“... rests on a piece of parchment drawn up when Catherine the Great was Empress of All the Russias and George III King of England. The Founding Fathers, wise in their generation, could not foresee Hot Lines, B52s and the social security system, but they knew that they had created an office that might be dangerous to liberty. Hence they hedged it round as best they ...”

“... Doyle’s ‘Silver Blaze’, in which a guard dog fails to bark when a racehorse is killed and Holmes rightly deduces that the animal didn’t raise the alarm because he knew the criminal. The reader of these opening anecdotes in Silence: A Christian History senses that MacCulloch, Professor of the History of the Church at Oxford and one of the most lucid ...”

“... of letters, having paid close attention to the published correspondence of Balzac, Flaubert and George Sand, and alert to the power of editors. After reading Sidney Colvin’s edition of the letters of his friend Robert Louis Stevenson, he wrote: ‘One has the vague sense of omissions and truncations – one smells the thing unprinted.’ In the years ...”

“... what was not harmonious’. She also wrote that the 19th-century novel was ‘a Judaised novel: George Eliot and Dickens and Tolstoy were all touched by the Jewish covenant: they wrote of conduct and the consequences of conduct: they were concerned with a society of will and commandment’. Auden said that he had within him a ‘mad clergyman’, who often ...”