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“... Ireland is another example of this sapping of legality and so, too, is the case of Constable William McCaughey. Along with a police sergeant called Weir, McCaughey was tried and convicted of murdering a Catholic shopkeeper in revenge for an attack by the Provisional IRA. Both policemen were also convicted of kidnapping and threatening to murder a ...”

“... Europe and America. An ancient city, a capital, with authors of all kinds, from Gavin Douglas to James Boswell to Annie S. Swan, Sir Compton Mackenzie and a thousand others: the subject is God’s own gift to the sifter of anecdotes and the historian of large-scale cultural change. Trevor Royle tackles it with affection and enthusiasm. Admirable as these ...”

“... experience and his recent humiliation as a lecturer, he was chosen in 1836, through his friend James Stephen at the Colonial Office, to lead a commission of inquiry into Maltese affairs. The story of the Austins’ two years in Malta is a complicated one, excellently told. Austin and a colleague, his former student George Cornewall Lewis, proved adept at ...”

“... Garrison prob’ly, and so naturally that’s what you believe until next month when you get to James Lemon and get convinced that Virginia and Pennsylvania were strongly entrepreneurial and capitalist back in 1740. That’ll last until some time in your second year, then you’ll be in here regurgitating Gordon Wood about the pre-revolutionary utopia and ...”

“... who slaughtered five thousand wild beasts on the opening day of the Colosseum. It was left to James I to popularise baiting as an attraction at the Tower, thus promoting the sport from the disreputable status it enjoyed in the urban bear gardens. For better viewing, James refashioned the Lion Tower, but there was little ...”

“... seize on any pairings that offered themselves (‘his antagonisms and his ingratiations’ – of James Kelman; ‘drugs … poured their balm, but embalmed him’ – of Robert Lowell; ‘Emmas, Cockburn and Rothschild’ – a Listener cover line; ‘Gray’s Elegy, and Wynne Godley’s’ – an LRB cover line), was always there but became more pronounced ...”

“... they couldn’t come back. What would they do?In his LRB Winter Lecture about not going home, James Wood coined a nice word: ‘homelooseness’. ‘Exile is acute, massive, transformative,’ he said, ‘but homelooseness … can be banal, welcome, necessary, continuous.’ I agree that if home is only a train away, exile is too strong a word. It might ...”

“... 1985, with the postscript to Lean Tales, the short story collection he shared with Agnes Owens and James Kelman. ‘A director of a London publishing house,’ he wrote (in the third person), ‘asked him if he had enough stories to make another collection. Gray said no. There was a handful of stories he had intended to build into another collection, but found ...”

“... Gibbon was made a member in 1774 and Adam Smith in 1775. The importance of other members, such as James Boswell and the pioneering linguistician William Jones, was recognised only posthumously. Alongside Johnson himself (and before one even gets to Garrick or Reynolds), their involvement supports Leo Damrosch’s claim that ...”

“... of his closest friendships remained formal, mediated through books; his longstanding translator, William Weaver, recalled Calvino flinching every time he was obliged to call him ‘Bill’. In a preface to Numbers in the Dark, a collection of short and very short stories, Calvino’s widow, Esther, quotes a note from 1943 that she discovered among his ...”

“... William Joyce, ‘Lord Haw-Haw’, recorded his last ever broadcast from the temporary offices of the German Radio Corporation, in Hamburg, on the day Hitler shot himself. British troops were on the point of entering the city and Joyce and his colleagues had raided the cellars of the Funkhaus, drinking everything they could find ...”

“... about after the dazzlement is over. Brian Levack and Linda Levy Peck write about the reign of James I, a subject to which Professor Hexter returned recently with a devastating attack on the so-called ‘revisionists’: those who believe either that the English Civil War was an accident with no causes at all or that it was the product of aristocratic ...”

“... Sydney Smith and William Burke lived at the same time and in the same country: but at opposite ends of the spectrum of class, ends which rarely met, except in court. Such people were strangers to one another, foreigners, and could hate and suspect one another in the style that has been reserved for foreigners. Smith and Burke lived for a while in the same place, Edinburgh – the city of Calvin and caller air, of metaphysics and foul smells, according to Smith, who claimed, in a typical tease, that he had to detach a passer-by ‘blown flat against my door’ by the prevailing winds, and ‘black in the face ...”

“... One of the odder political books I have read is The Abuse of Power, by James Margach, the veteran lobby correspondent of the Sunday Times. Published in 1978, the book was subtitled with a flourish: ‘The war between Downing Street and the media from Lloyd George to Callaghan’. For 40 years and more, Margach had enjoyed the confidence of prime ministers ...”

“... he demand, beyond the desirability of a strong quote for the dust-wrapper, any comparison with William Burroughs and Junkie. We are told by MacCabe that Healy’s reading habits favoured trash-factory crime fiction. Therefore, it is presumed, he dropped naturally into ‘the hard-boiled cadences of a Hammet [sic] detective novel’. It is regrettable that ...”