“... father was an assistant professor at Harvard, that Cambridge was still thought of as the home of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and James Russell Lowell, both recently deceased, and that across the river was a Boston which still called itself ‘the Athens of America’. Edward Cummings, the father, was a man of modern ...”

“... celebrated Hemingway, Steinbeck, Dos Passos, Richard Wright, Erskine Caldwell, Dashiel Hammett and James M. Cain, Beauvoir was told, when the United States had its own sophisticated tradition of internal, psychological exploration; she was witnessing the formation of the American Studies canon – Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, ...”

“... that will not enable the establishment of a Palestinian state’. Alon noted that when in 2005 James Wolfensohn negotiated an agreement signed by Israel and the Palestinian Authority, which was intended to ease restrictions on Palestinians travelling in the Occupied Territories, the IDF eased them for the settlers instead; for Palestinians, the number of ...”

“... but implied that it had survived the crash only because of its undue influence in high places: Henry Paulson, its former CEO, was Bush’s treasury secretary. Since then the firm has suffered one public relations disaster after another, culminating in a $550 million out-of-court settlement to avoid prosecution for fraud by the Securities and Exchange ...”

“... explorers, not usually prone to doubts. ‘What should be called the source of a river?’ Henry Morton Stanley asked. ‘A lake which receives the insignificant rivers flowing into it and discharges all by one great outlet, or the tributaries which the lake collects?’ Stanley favoured the former theory, pointing out that otherwise it would be ...”

“... In December 1501 the Scottish poet William Dunbar received £5 from the Court of King James IV, a payment which was given to him, according to the Treasurer’s accounts, ‘eftir he com furth of Ingland’. It is not known for sure what he had been doing there. He may well have been in the entourage of the Scottish embassy which was conducting the negotiations with Henry VII that led to the marriage two years later of Princess Margaret Tudor to James IV ...”

“... in ours; and certainly not Thomas More. He is seen as a Catholic martyr because he died opposing Henry VIII’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon and the King’s robbery from the Pope of the leadership of the English Church. But he is also seen as a lawyer-layman caught in the mesh of presumptuous ecclesiology, an English Cicero of the pre-Reformation who ...”

“... O’Brien, Maurice Gee, Brian Moore and Andrew O’Hagan, have made a big effort. Others, such as James Joyce, have managed to weave religion into a larger fabric, with all the sheer drama of faith and doubt, and have managed also to include the comic possibilities of dogma and ritual to liven up their books. In Ulysses Leopold Bloom, in musing on the use of ...”

“... predecessor is lost – the first ever detective story or civilised thriller. The drama critic James Agate, who once savagely described Donald Wolfit’s Hamlet as a private detective watching the jewels at the Claudius-Gertrude wedding feast, may have said more than he knew. Yet to praise Hamlet as the first detective story makes sense mainly in terms of ...”

“... A famous passage in Henry James’s Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne laments the absence for the writer in America of every relation and institution which made writing socially viable – an army and a navy and a church and a court, and classes and village squires and evening parties. James’s view of the materials available to the writer may strike us today as somewhat old-fashioned and unenterprising, but there is a basic shrewdness in what he says ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... It was as though an artist such as Picasso, whose father was a failed painter, or William James, whose father was a failed essayist, or V.S. Naipaul, sought to compensate for his father’s failure while at the same time using his talent as a way of killing the father off, showing his mother who was the real man in the household. Jorge Luis Borges was ...”

“... Henry VI had an unusually long reign, but on most counts a singularly unfortunate one. He lost the lands gained in France by his father Henry V, he became embroiled in the Wars of the Roses, his son was killed and he himself died in mysterious circumstances as a prisoner in the Tower of London ...”

“... to share Annie and Sir Merton’s interest in 19th-century theatre, and had grown attached to the Henry Irving Room – the guest bedroom in which the actor had stayed for a weekend, subsequently turned into a shrine, full of relics bought at auction after his death – and had also noticed that some of the theatrical portraits the Russell-Coteses had ...”

“... their simplicity, have an unprecedented sensuality. Picasso’s usually reticent dealer, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, said that they seemed to have been painted by a satyr or a giant rather than a human being; they left him ‘écrasé’ – ‘stunned’. Turning from these images the viewer is confronted by the firework display of MoMA’s Girl before a ...”