“... experimental film called Infinite Jest directed by ‘après-garde’ inventor-turned-film maker James O. Incandenza. As the name suggests, James is the father of Hal; once upon a time James too was a tennis prodigy (as was his father before him), and he used the fortune he earned from ...”

“... plus a smattering of tourists had much good to say about Britain’s capital. Literary folk like James and Conrad slipped into the illusionary language of the dark sublime. London was dismal, blackened, sick, cruel and unplanned, concurred the charitable and the analytic; the sooner the authorities could draw the working population and their smokestacks out ...”

“... private vendettas, had brought charges against the New York attorney general, Letitia James, who had investigated Trump for fraud.A recess was called and the chosen jurors were led off for lunch at the Silverado Buffet. I was looking for somewhere to have lunch myself when the judge fell in step with me. He seemed glad of my interest in his court ...”

“... Simone’s singing broadcast not just a new sound but a new time. Ella Fitzgerald, Lena Horne, Nat King Cole – great black song stylists who emerged out of the 1940s and crossed over into the commercial white mainstream – succeeded precisely because their tone and diction took race out of their voices; they swung but without soul, which made the songs and ...”

“... elaborately presented. In the great tournament ordered by Henry VIII in 1511, for example, the king and three companions, presenting themselves as ‘les quater Chivalers de la forrest salvigne’, emerged from an elaborate artificial wood, consisting of ‘12 hawthorns, 12 oaks, 12 maples, 10 birches, 16 dozen fern roots and branches, 60 broom stalks, and ...”

“... of Oxford, ranger of Snowdon Forest, or high steward of Windsor, Bristol, Reading, Abingdon, King’s Lynn, Great Yarmouth, Wallingford, Tewkesbury and St Albans – that he didn’t manage to visit Kenilworth once during the first three years he owned it. Despite the elaborate heraldry he had carved into the walls of the castle, he was an ...”

“... To be a patriot was to be a spokesman for the ‘old ways’ of the people against the bad modern king, lords and parliament. Hazlitt mildly criticised this tendency in Cobbett’s left-wing ally, Sir Francis Burdett, who was always ‘wanting to go back to the early times of our Constitution and history in search of the principles of law ...”

“... when Mr Phillips remembers going to see a play with his son about another recently unemployed man, King Lear, his response is predictable (the kind of thing you find in Larkin’s letters), but (also like the man in Larkin’s letters) subtle in refusing the available subtleties, and distrustful of them. In retrospect he sees it as one of the longest four ...”

“... his stepfather, ‘the Orator writes all the University letters, makes all the Orations, be it to King, Prince, or whatever comes to the University.’ It required great skill as a Latinist and the willingness to apply that skill to the occasion at hand. Herbert hoped it would prove a stepping-stone to a position at court, as it had for the two previous ...”

“... aimed at achieving just such a compromise between Iraq and Kuwait. President Mubarak of Egypt, King Fahd of Saudi Arabia and King Hussein of Jordan were all convinced that the rising tension between Baghdad and Kuwait City could be defused. Saddam Hussein proved them wrong. As at every other defining moment in his ...”

“... doubt. The book ends with the evasive reflection that you cannot blame the conflict on king or kaiser. Instead, a conveniently abstracted and personified Death takes the rap. The novel is unable or unwilling to transcend its protagonist’s restricted outlook on the question of why all this is happening. Willie’s view is not restricted because he ...”

“... experimenting with in his free time. Ehrich, by now better known as Harry Houdini, the Handcuff King, would say years later that the released prisoner was ‘the only person in the world beside my wife who knows how I open locks’. If he’d been concentrating, he could have had quite a career. As Ehrich liked to remind the inhabitants of Appleton, his ...”

“... Verga, the verista novelist admired and translated by D.H. Lawrence (and discussed here by James Wood on 10 August) – is the key to Sicily, where people like to explain, over the most concentrated espresso drunk anywhere in Europe, exactly why everyone else’s version of an incident or situation is flawed, self-interested, corrupt or downright ...”

“... to her own brother. Others, less sure of themselves, fall through the cracks. Lucia Joyce, James Joyce’s troubled daughter, given to ‘acting up, setting her hair on fire’, is packed off to Switzerland to be ‘stilled, in a straitjacket’. Hazel, Peggy’s younger sister (always late, forgetful, bewildered), ends up in a New York institution ...”

“... the riots the Duchess made her first public political move, standing on the hustings with Charles James Fox, who was contesting Westminster in the September General Election and whose mistress she may, or may not, at some point have been. Although she was there for only a short time, many were shocked by her boldness. At the Westminster by-election two years ...”