“... between the houses. It is not the streets that exist. It is the streets that no longer exist. James Fenton, ‘A German Requiem’ The topic of international space is like one of those monstrous catfish which used to loaf around the hot-water outfalls of the Berlin power stations. You could hook it, net it, spear it, or even seize it in your arms if it ...”

“... ancient Maori (te ao tawhito) with Europeans – the Dutch under Tasman in 1642, the English under James Cook in 1769-70, the French under Surville in 1770 and Marion du Fresne in 1772 – with a view to understanding, as far as can be discovered, who these groups of people were, and why they saw each other and responded to each other as they did. It is one of ...”

“... to make political statements. Rubens’s Whitehall ceiling pays tribute to Charles’s father, James VI and I, promotes an exalted image of monarchy and attests to the grandeur of the House of Stuart. Its great central panel, The Glorification of James I, shows a scene of apotheosis. ...”

“... the end of her long career, Braddon had earned a grudging respect from her contemporaries. Henry James acknowledged that her novels were ‘brilliant, lively, ingenious and destitute of a ray of sentiment’. In a letter of 1911 he told her that ‘I used to follow you ardently.’ But after her death Braddon’s reputation declined, along with the ...”

“... the Department of English at Princeton, traces the Western’s obsession with masculinity from James Fenimore Cooper through Owen Wister, Zane Grey and John Ford to Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah. His subject is the well-known tautology that a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. For Mitchell, the Western novel is essentially theatrical – a stage on ...”

“... North-West. They had been running Westmorland like a giant pocket borough since the heyday of Sir James (‘Wicked Jimmy’) Lowther, 1st earl of Lonsdale: a man Thomas De Quincey called ‘a true Feudal Chieftain’, notorious for his ‘gloomy temper and habits of oppression’. Wicked Jimmy went to a better (or worse) place in 1802, at which point the ...”

“... of time!”.’ Bayley distinguished between those writers – he had Virginia Woolf and Henry James in mind – upon whom ‘a passionate and omnivorous interest in life’ is laid as a sacred duty, and other writers – Tolstoy and Jane Austen sustained this quality – who are too far inside life to find it ‘interesting’. The art of Tolstoy and Jane ...”

“... crab and lobster from the sea channels nearby that Edwin was sickened by it for life. His father, James, ‘took a special delight’ in sowing barley by hand and the whole family ‘felt the first day was a special day’ when ‘the black fields glistened, and a row of meal-coloured sacks, bursting full like the haunches of horses, ran down each one.’ But ...”

“... his hypocrisy. A glass wall is allowed to separate the proud sodomite of the 1890s from the homo-hunter of succeeding decades, and another goes up in the late 1920s, to allow a more repentant figure to make an entrance. When the translator is produced in court to testify that an article published in Paris in 1896, celebrating the superiority of sodomites ...”

“... chapters detail his antihero’s inept, mendacious behaviour in Ukraine, trying to dig up dirt on Hunter Biden and being snookered by a Russian asset, and his even more baseless, unconscionable efforts to monkey-wrench the results of the 2020 election through stunts and feckless lawsuits, flapping papers around like Joe McCarthy brandishing his list of State ...”

“... why the author bothered with a pseudonym. Colley (like Banks) is a disciple of the ‘blessed St Hunter’ (a Scotsman detail that does not ring entirely true). As part of his Fear and Loathing in Midlothian act, the speed-snorting, toke-puffing Colley uncovers scandals to do with local nuclear submarine bases (there is some topical reference to Rosyth) 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 ...”

“... characters got a tick if they were on the side of liberty (Cromwell, Chatham), a cross (Charles I, James II) if they held up the march of progress. Because he went in for active royalty and made some attempt to govern on his own account rather than leaving it to the Whig aristocracy, George III had been written up as a villain and a clumsy tyrant. This view ...”

“... than obvious. On one CD-pilfering excursion, for instance, Mark Rothko discreetly stuffs a copy of James Taylor’s Greatest Hits into his pocket, having heard his father listening to it earlier. Mark Rothko acquired his nickname following a school trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, during which he pushed a fellow pupil into a painting. And though he now ...”

“... without limit, and, lacking the certainty of a completed thing, will never entirely disappoint. James Agee had a fortunate career on the face of it, as a New York freelance for almost two decades and then as a screenwriter. One of the large talents of American writing in the 1940s, Agee was a Southerner, from Knoxville, Tennessee, who came North, stayed and ...”