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“... I’m one of those writers who likes to stay with what he knows,’ James Gillespie, the persistently apolitical hero of Ronan Bennett’s third novel, The Catastrophist (1998), says. Gillespie, now a novelist, was once a historian. In his PhD he had argued that ‘the great political and religious upheavals of the 16th century owed little to ideological or doctrinal conviction, and everything to the Tudor state’s perpetual need for cash ...”

“... Brag was its making so little of the other ascribed poem in Rawlinson 160: the Epitaph on Elias James. As Leslie Hotson showed some years ago, Shakespeare had links with a brewer of that name during his sojourn near St Andrew by the Wardrobe. Doubtless the Oxford editors felt that a single unfamiliar poem was as much as the public would swallow at once, but ...”

“... animation on everything the poet saw and put into words. In a sense it was much the same for Henry James, that other great equivocator of the American literary scene, and always a great admirer of Whitman. James’s prose, even the late prose, is paradoxically as physical as Leaves of Grass, and in the same way. A kind of ...”

“... of these.’) In Aspects of the Novel (1927), Forster was similarly uncowed by the shadow of Henry James, taking swipes at James’s disciple Percy Lubbock and implying that it was silly to get hung up on doctrines of ‘economy and architecture’. You could arrange a story in the shape of an hourglass, as Forster said ...”

“... The pub has become as much a restaurant as it is a place to have a drink. It is owned by Greene King, the brewing company, and run by a Polish woman who lives upstairs. It is full most evenings: customers smoking cigarettes stand on the pavement. One of the barmen is from Stettin – ‘Paris of the Baltic’, as he likes to say – and studied ...”

“... from Andrewes’s sermon on the role of the Magi in the Nativity story, preached at the court of James I at Christmas 1622, was to be incorporated virtually word for word into the opening lines of the 1927 poem ‘The Journey of the Magi’: ‘A cold coming they had of it, at this time of the yeare; just the worst time of the yeare . . . the waies ...”

“... be a second-rate motor salesman, or a yellow-press journalist, pickled in alcohol and nicotine,’ James Bond tells himself about halfway through From Russia with Love, the fifth and perhaps the best of Ian Fleming’s thrillers. This sounds like good advice, but it does raise one large issue: what exactly counts as being ‘pickled’? Flying from London to ...”

“... appear to have held on to the Senate, and made some progress in the House, where Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia will soon become the first QAnon supporter to be elected to Congress. Trumpism and its darker manifestations are far from dead. Democrats have won the national popular vote in seven of the last eight elections, yet they are struggling to get ...”

“... and expect you to do the cooking yourself’. Towards the end of his life, his attacks on Henry James, Katherine Mansfield – a ‘neurotic, sick woman’ – and even Chekhov, whom he’d once admired, were frequent and hysterical. For good measure, he began to make disobliging remarks about mass-educated white-collar workers. ‘They have no ...”

“... the life out of any presumptuous rewriting, converting it into so much anaemic homage. Graham Greene tells us that in his apprentice days he found The Heart of Darkness so overwhelming an influence that he had to give up reading Conrad altogether. Nevertheless, Greene went on to write The Heart of the ...”

“... There is some evidence to suggest he contributed more than an initial to the ‘M’ figure in the James Bond books: hence Masters’s title. ‘M’, true enough, was the office sobriquet of Maxwell Knight, though not his only extra appellation. His work made it necessary for him to have a pseudonym or two at his disposal, and so we find ‘Captain ...”

“... Berry, Paul Bourget, Abbé Mugnier, Ralph and Lisa Curtis, Madame de Cossé-Brissac, Rosa Fitz-James (“the best hostess I have ever known”), and Philomène de Lévis-Mirepoix – all members of the fashionable upper crust of cosmopolitan Paris.’ Was there no one among all these fascinating people, we wonder, as we try to keep awake, who left a vivid ...”

“... more correctly rendered ‘Horn of Antimony’. If there were a Spark Notebook, like Henry James’s, an imaginable entry might run: ‘Suppose that in our time some rich man were not only deep in the study of Job but himself in a situation of – well, shall I say discomfort, interested in the vague analogy between himself and his subject? Something ...”

“... D.H. Lawrence; he was for years Conrad’s indispensable prop; he was close to his revered Henry James, though perhaps less close than he thought. He was on companionable terms with Wells, Joyce, Eliot, Wyndham Lewis and the ungrateful Hemingway. Throughout his life he strove to keep up with les jeunes; Lawrence called him ‘everybody’s blessed ...”

“... governments have set up to harass broadcasters, Reith dashed off a very good one, though Hugh Greene put it even better, and more succinctly, thirty years later. On his own initiative, Reith launched the Empire Service and later pushed ahead with foreign-language transmissions. But when we look at what the BBC was dispensing, whether at home or abroad ...”