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“... like the signpost to a pair of English villages, we are directed towards ‘the Mills’. Mill St James or Mill St John? On arrival there is no option since only John Stuart Mill is on the map. How frustrating to run out of fresh clues (see Utilitarianism is there, of course) just at the point when an entry for Classical Economics might have been ...”

“... became a schoolmaster in Kent, and his son became a headmaster in Essex, and his son, my father, Peter Bunting, fought with distinction, while only a very young man, in the Second World War, and after it was over went up to Brasenose College, Oxford – the first time a Bunting had been so elevated, and unfortunately the last, since I was a student only at ...”

“... James Pope-Hennessy, who was murdered in 1974 when he was 58, will be remembered for several of his books, among them London Fabric, an architectural study made in the nick of time in 1939, a young man’s book which has worn well; the two volumes of his life of Monckton Milnes, Lord Houghton; Verandah of 1964, with its autobiographical element added to family and colonial history; and the excellent Queen Mary (1959), an unusually sympathetic study ...”

“... in squares and parks all over her erstwhile empire than with a portrait like Sargent’s of Henry James, which encourages you to look for evidence of personality in physiognomy. Iconic portraits by contrast are suitable memorials of reputation. That is what the boardroom and the college committee are after, even if they very rarely get it. The simplified ...”

“... dates the origins of the British party system, whether with the attempt to exclude the Catholic James from the succession to Charles II, with the rivalry between the Younger Pitt and Charles James Fox, or with the battle over Parliamentary Reform in the 1830s – Lord Blake prefers the second of these – it is evident ...”

“... fish.’ So Demosthenes vilified a political opponent, as publicly corrupt and privately depraved. James Davidson’s concern is with those ancient appetites: food, drink and sex in classical Athens. At one level, he provides a guided tour from bordello to Billingsgate; at another, an essay on the politics of consumption. Social historians of antiquity face ...”

“... at all: in other words, that the notion of a sustained Parliamentary opposition to James I and Charles I, leading inevitably to a military conflict fought over constitutional principles, cannot be sustained. Indeed, they look with deep suspicion at any notion of inevitability. They admit that the Crown was faced with serious problems – of ...”

“... there’s a universality about him that finds echoes in non-Russians like Chinua Achebe or James Hogg who span the distance from village hearth to salon without feeling the need to pledge allegiance to one or the other. Leskov is the titular protagonist of Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘The Storyteller’, where the critic offers internet-anticipating ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... malice. Vincent Price was too camp to be really alarming, even as the witchfinder general. Peter Lorre was heartbreaking as a child murderer. James Gandolfini, playing an incorrigibly mean-minded godfather for seven years, strangely held on to the affection of most of his mass audience. ...”

“... a scary, revelatory, toxic shimmer. The characters see in italics, like virgins out of Henry James, and then forget, so that we’re made to feel that only the story itself, with its irony and vertiginous impersonality, preserves their vision. Eisenberg’s craft is underlined by the fact that she covers the same sort of ground as the ...”

“... fired him. The disagreements were political. The issue which led to the final break was the story James Cameron and Bert Hardy brought back from Korea about the treatment of prisoners in the South. Hulton would not publish it. Picture Post was a model for a new kind of pictorial journalism. Television documentary and news programmes, where many of the ...”

“... show signs of wanting to improve themselves, you tend to agree with Harold Ross, who, finding James Thurber practising his drawing technique, told him to stop, because if he was any good he’d be terrible. Artists themselves may want to keep their innocence for all sorts of reasons: pleasure in detailing facts lost in more sophisticated ...”

“... is none of the engagement with character and setting which marks even the trophy-like compositions James Broom-Lynne drew for the jackets of the hardback editions of A Dance to the Music of Time. In the early novels the worlds of art, music and writing interpenetrate. One can imagine Black rubbing shoulders with Barnby. The Modernism which became the dominant ...”

“... could be, lived here. Novelists put characters in rooms that give colour to their thoughts. Henry James does it memorably in the first paragraph of The Wings of the Dove: She waited, Kate Croy, for her father to come in, but he kept her unconscionably, and there were moments at which she showed herself, in the glass over the mantel, a face positively pale ...”