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“... offered to send her any books she wanted, for a copy of Wild America by Roger Tory Peterson and James Fisher. An account of a 30,000-mile journey around the continent by two naturalists, it was originally published in 1955 and was being reissued in memory of Peterson, who had recently died. Fitzgerald wanted it, however, for the sake of his co-author, who ...”

“... he found ‘the genuine British cockney in all his terrors’, and in his hotel was a ‘genuine king’. Both kings and cockneys, he felt, were very objectionable neighbours in a hotel. Henry James thought the new breed of tourists were ‘rarely, to judge by their faces and talk, children of light to any eminent ...”

“... started slowly. Before the First World War, smoking had doubtful associations for most Americans. James Buchanan Duke’s American Tobacco Company pioneered the manufacture of desire by surrounding cigarettes with Orientalist fantasy, but the unintended consequence of such advertising was to reinforce the connection in the popular mind between smoking and ...”

“... for Boys: it tells the story of Elwood Curtis, a talented 16-year-old acolyte of Martin Luther King Jr, who has hope and promise snatched away by the torturous racial violence to which he’s subjected at a reform school in Florida in the early 1960s.Assured of another bestseller, Whitehead turned back to Harlem Shuffle. Unlike Elwood Curtis, who writes ...”

“... tested operatic techniques to retell an existing story, and even Britten, in his setting of Henry James, leaned heavily on technique when genuine inspiration dimmed. But in composing The Midsummer Marriage Tippett, typically, discovered the techniques that he needed to write the piece as he went along. The music shimmered and sparkled, but without an ounce of ...”

“... of clubland skulduggery.Yet this is the standard, both of writing and editing and research. When James Jesus Angleton, crazed and criminal head of the CIA, suffered himself to be asked a few questions by a panel of cringing Congressmen, he took care to tell them that they had no right to inquire into his business, and were not in any case equipped to ...”

“... Hardly any good poems came out of the conflict in Vietnam and most of those were written by James Fenton, a poet alert to the eerie surrealism of war. What happens when the war is banished from the front page and into the history books? Pound said, in the ABC of Reading, that ‘literature is news that STAYS news.’ Eliot, on the other hand, was less ...”

“... gave a reading at the Keynote Club in Manhattan. Kallman and another Brooklyn student, Walter James Miller, were in the audience, with Kallman sitting in the front row giving the two international pederasts the glad eye. Afterwards he and Miller went backstage. Miller was tall, blond, Anglo-Saxon and (a friend who was not a ...”

“... standard edition of his prose writings, but we now have the full run in a distinguished edition by James Woolley. It is now possible, without visiting rare book libraries, to read the essays of both men in their original context, with their relation to one another in clear view. Sheridan’s (hopelessly inferior) essays help to throw light on Swift’s ...”

“... with Keegan, John Ramsden shifts our attention firmly to the postwar decades. Like Robert Rhodes James thirty years ago, he argues that if Churchill had died in 1939, his life would probably have been construed as a spectacular failure – more promise than performance. Gallipoli, 1915, was still held against him; since 1929 he had been railing in the ...”

“... had unexpected former careers: one was an ex-pickpocket, and one a highwayman who had turned king’s evidence to save his neck. Others came from thoroughly peaceable trades: a hatter, a pastry-cook, a button-maker, a saddler and a shoemaker all signed up in the course of the next few decades. The court at Bow Street was on the ground floor of the ...”

“... salary as royal gardener is indexed alphabetically with his other incomings, under ‘K’ for ‘King’. The confidence must have been partly temperamental but it was based on solid foundations: his education in the village school in Kirkharle and the locally well-respected Cambo school, as well as his apprenticeship with William Loraine. And Northumberland ...”

“... Abrahamus Trippie and Jacobus Depre. (The two Jacobi would, of course, be Jacques in French and James in English. Mullett is elsewhere written as Millett, and Trippie as Tippey.) Mountjoy puts up £20 – half of the required bail – to guarantee their appearance at the forthcoming Sessions of the Peace, where they are ‘bound to answere their ...”

“... modern practitioners as L.P. Hartley and Walter de la Mare, to the definitive achievements of M.R. James, Stevenson and Le Fanu, and their Gothic predecessors. The ghost story, or original tale of the supernatural, was essentially a short story, delicately crafted to obtain the maximum effect from its metaphysical equivocations. If it did not aspire to the ...”

“... saying that the only VC awarded to an Ulsterman during the war had been won by a Catholic, James Magennis. One of the people on the panel, his boss, came back at him in a dull stupid rigid voice: ‘I happen to know he only got the Victoria Cross because he happened to be a Catholic.’ That combination of bigotry, crassness and sheer thick ignorance ...”