“... was supported by Tailyour family connections determined to use their influence on behalf of the young man. His African ancestry had to be explicitly denied. Once in India James’s letters reveal the extent to which he had adopted a white colonial identity: he gives hostile accounts of the Indian ‘natives’ and complains bitterly about lack of ...”

“... history of Dorset’s birds. Of the other characters involved, the Earl of Ilchester was Henry Stephen Fox-Strangways (1787-1858), who lived at Melbury House near Evershot, in west Dorset. Built in the 16th century, Melbury is a grand English country house with formal gardens, lakes and an extensive deer park. Lord Digby (1809-89) was Sir Edward St Vincent ...”

“... Commonwealth immigrants as well. ‘Sorry, love,’ kindly immigration officials would say to us young Australians, directing us to the long non-British entry line at Customs. ‘It’s a shame, but we have to do it.’I tried appealing to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office for special permission to go on the British exchange, but my application was ...”

“... embraced in non-Christian examples: illusion is the domain of spirits. Among Christians (as Stephen Greenblatt has observed) these qualities are more problematic. Mimetic art – especially theatre – has troubled many Western thinkers, Christian or otherwise. Christianity is founded on a series of truth claims – the gospel, the saving act, the ...”

“... for the lighter but more efficient cane: much relish here in the details. ‘Dick’ moans to Stephen Spender: ‘Even if I become prime minister, I’ll never again be as great as I was at Winchester.’ ‘Dick’ is immortalised by John Betjeman: Broad of Church and Broad of Mind, Broad Before and Broad Behind. ‘Dick’ competes with Auden for the ...”

“... could expose Mason to comparison, not only with two serious recent biographies, of Wordsworth by Stephen Gill and of Coleridge by Richard Holmes, but with Susan Eilenberg’s persuasive book-length treatment of this very subject. Mason underplays the psychological interest of Wordsworth’s unceremonious takeover of the second edition, and (surely) its ...”

“... a spy is arrested’ was set up in type but never printed: the Westminster’s editor, Stephen Spender’s uncle, was mildly pro-German in 1912, and he also turned down a piece called ‘In Fortified Germany’. But the third and fourth articles made it – Lawrence’s debut as a travel writer – and they already exhibit their author’s hedgehog ...”

“... is, basically, a series of quotes from a venerable collection of Whig historians: Macaulay, Stephen, Beljame, and Legouis and Cazamian. Curiously, he deals only in the most general terms with Addison’s writing; the main concern of his discussion of the bourgeois ‘public sphere’ is to define the paradigmatic ‘speech act’ performed in the ...”

“... by Holbein with her old-fashioned head-dress and pursed little lips, becomes here ‘a plain young woman with a silvery pallor, a habit of silence, and a trick of looking at men as if they represent an unpleasant surprise’. Mantel’s pictorialism can become almost imagist, in the Ezra Pound sense, when she is describing Jane. So when she first touches ...”

“... discarded. Guthrie, like, say, Balzac, Simenon, Joyce Carol Oates, Bob Dylan, Richmal Crompton and Stephen King, was basically a writing machine, someone constantly in the process of noting, notating and composing. Born in Okemah, Oklahoma in 1912, Guthrie was brought up in Texas, then lived in California, New York and Florida, but he didn’t really belong ...”

“... the US , going back to seven fabled three-hour tussles between the Illinois senatorial candidates Stephen Douglas and Abraham Lincoln in 1858 (which certainly did involve direct confrontation), all on the single subject of slavery. In the 1920s, the League of Women Voters sponsored a ten-month series of radio debates, not between presidential candidates but ...”

“... 20-year-old maid inaugurated a similar union, the Scottish Federation of Domestic Workers. Jessie Stephen told the assembled crowd of mistresses and maids that she was ‘out to preach the divine doctrine of discontent’. Soon blacklisted by employers – one of the dangers of unionisation – she made her way to London and joined forces with Oliver. The ...”

“... listening. When I asked Abdi what the land here would normally look like at this time of year, a young man shoved a cellphone into my hand to show me a photo of himself reclining in a field of tall green grass. He pointed to a patch of bare earth behind him, where the photo had been taken, and laughed. War rarely feels far away. The wrecks of Siad Barre’s ...”

“... The overthrow of the awful Edwardians, the triumph of Bloomsbury over the Kensington of Leslie Stephen, were unmitigated joys. Lehmann, who published her first novel, Dusty Answer, to sensational acclaim in 1927, smoked, danced and divorced her way through the interwar years with gayer abandon than most. During one particularly frank sexual discussion at a ...”

“... something very much more – accept the fact that this may never be? And if there was once, when young, a romantic wish to die, and a courting of death, what then? Will there be guilt, and a dark attempt to shift the blame?’ These are not real questions. Long before we can dial through to Ontario and press our own special insights on the author, the ...”