“... Great Expectations, Lolita, Washington Square, Mrs Dalloway, Cousin Bette, Oscar and Lucinda, Julian Barnes’s Metroland and three works by Conrad. From a Daily Express review of The Talented Mr Ripley in February 2000, I learned three new words in the space of a single clause: ‘a conspiracy of patriarchal decorum in which even Dickie’s father ...”

“... she turned to the work of the poet Nelly Sachs, who chose to rinse her German in the waters of Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig and their version of scripture, rather than depend on Luther’s translation; Sachs wanted to catch their ‘psalmodic breath … creating a new space for responsibility instead of being crushed under the weight of original ...”

“... moment in the power-lifting of Jewish-American fiction. ‘Over the past ten or 15 years,’ Julian Moynihan announced in the New York Times, ‘Jewish writers – Bernard Malamud, J.D. Salinger, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, inter alia – have emerged as a dominant movement in our literature. Herzog, in several senses, is the great pay-off book of that ...”

“... annual holidays in New York and the Riviera to local beauties. No such scruples inhibited Father Julian Henshaw, the Firbankian priest Carstairs brought in from Capri to preside over the spiritual life of the island: on his merry way to drinking and fox-trotting himself to death, he delighted in pederastic idylls with his Whale Cay choirboys.As the years ...”

“... The Black and White Minstrel Show, just as I laughed at the byplay between ‘Sandy and my fwiend Julian’ in Round the Horne without understanding the innuendo.My epiphany occurred late on a Saturday evening in November 1962. I was a spotty 15-year-old with an unsteady grasp of the difference between girls and Martians, and a literary urge whose expression ...”

“... he called ‘irreplaceable’), while the saint’s embrace of a leper in Flaubert’s ‘Julian the Hospitaller’ takes hospitality to another extreme. Meanwhile Molière’s Dom Juan plays host to a stone guest, the statue of a man he slaughtered, who returns the invitation; which may remind us of the way Hamlet follows the ghost of his murdered ...”

“... have been, according to A. Alvarez, ‘a professional patrician’, but he was also, according to Martin Dodsworth, guilty of ‘artistic parasitism’. In his capacity as Poet Laureate, according to Julian Symons, even ‘the task of producing semiofficial occasional poems that were also of poetic interest defeated ...”

“... to his current position as the go-to guy for shabby-genteel, pub-dwelling pre-colour seediness. (Julian Maclaren-Ross, his main competition these days, is associated with a slightly later period and a more confident bohemianism.) Jones had one or two revelations about Hamilton’s pitiable sex life, which was often confined to paying women to let him tie ...”

“... a gay novel called “Nineteen Forty-Eight”, in which two young Londoners called Winston and Julian fall in love with each other and struggle to sustain their relationship under the continuous threat of blackmail, exposure and arrest.’ He realises, of course, that neither Orwell nor his straight readers had any idea that the novel could be read in this ...”

“... contact with continental Europe. He received promises of support and much encouragement from Count Julian, the Exarch of Septem (Ceuta in Morocco). In April 711, Musa’s leading lieutenant, Tarik bin Ziyad, assembled an army of 7000 men, and crossed over to Europe near the rock which still bears his name, Jabal Tarik (or Gibraltar). Once again, the Muslim ...”

“... Stone Money’, published in 1991. There’s a particularly good retelling of the story by Felix Martin in his 2013 book Money: The Unauthorised Biography. Yap has no metal. There’s nothing to make into coins. What the Yapese do instead is sail 250 miles to an island called Palau, where there’s a particular kind of limestone not available on their home ...”

“... between car and human engineering. Jill Charnley remembers him roaring down to London in his Aston Martin – ‘a brute of a car, a good engineering car’ – to visit her. He told her he was redesigning nature, and illustrated his theories with ball bearings from the British Motor Corporation’s new Mini. They were married in 1957 and Jill moved into his ...”

“... seek button – derangingly – every two or three seconds. Burbly soft rock, stale oldies, Dean Martin singing Christmas carols, Mexican polka music, endless mirthless ads for Petco and Wal-Mart – the full auditory wasteland of American popular culture assailed us. Shades of when we used to be girlfriends. We bickered most of the rest of the way. By the ...”

“... defendants pleaded not guilty. Six men and six women then took their place in the jury box, and Mr Julian Bevan QC stood up to open for the Crown. According to lawyers and journalists who have observed him at work, Bevan is a ‘pleasant, mild sort of man’, ‘jolly in a hail-fellow-well-met sort of way’, ‘nice, but lacking the instinct for the jugular ...”

“... the liver team is seen as a ‘flagship service’.The patient safety expert (and airline pilot) Martin Bromiley believes there is a lack of oversight of influential consultants within hospitals: ‘You have people in charge with no process for reviewing or observing them. They are allowed to just go off and practise, to have a lot of autonomy and ...”