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“... light itself turning into money. Stephen’s debt re-emerges during his argument with the poet George ‘A.E.’ Russell (one of his many creditors) as he stakes his fraught bid for literary inheritance to his own reserve and storehouse, the five-vowelled alphabet: A.E.I.O.U. In Burke’s pub and Bella Cohen’s brothel, Stephen is as spendthrift as the ...”

“... devotees to complain that Americans have got him all wrong. As early as 1897, the radical John Jay Chapman presented him as a fellow iconoclast who had been miscast as an apologist for American selfishness, ‘embalmed in amber by the very forces he braved’. The tendency of biographers to make their own Emersons means that some academics dislike the ...”

“... case. Taped interviews with eight or so concerned onlookers (some of them, like Christopher Ricks, George Steiner and Gore Vidal, younger candidates for sagedom) are cut and rearranged to give a chronological sense of each career, but also a whiff of the blood and cordite of intellectual warfare. The purpose is not quite literary biography or portraiture, for ...”

“... SO15 counterterrorism unit. Some of the stories obtained this way were trivial, though intrusive: George Michael wept in his jail cell, for example, or a male British Airways worker secretly wore high heels. Others were more serious: security lapses at Heathrow, or equipment shortages in Afghanistan. Almost anything could be obtained if the offer was big ...”

“... 1935, for example, deciding to read some drama, he raced through Aeschylus, Beaumont and Fletcher, Chapman, Chekhov, Dekker, Dryden, Ford, Heywood, Jonson, Marston, Massinger, Middleton, Marlowe, O’Neill, Sophocles, Strindberg and Webster; in March he went on to Coleridge, Chaucer, Fielding and Petronius, and then had a go at Proust, Mann, Boswell and David ...”

“... Jeanne d’Arc, vierge souveraine! Marjorie Annan Bryce in a Suffragette procession to mark George V’s coronation in 1911. The song was adopted by the Resistance during World War Two, because Domrémy, Joan of Arc’s birthplace, stood in the part of Lorraine that had not been ceded to Prussia after the French defeat in 1871, and from that time ...”

“... Pollard shows that Greek was also part of their formation. Shakespeare’s early collaborator George Peele, for instance, translated Iphigenia in Aulis and explored the grief and rage of Hecuba in his narrative poem A Tale of Troy. Playwrights from Kyd, author of The Spanish Tragedy, to Heywood, often considered a popular, jobbing writer, were literate in ...”

“... and the Establishment would have crumbled. Nevertheless the sleuths have had their triumphs. Chapman Pincher is certainly one of the best-informed men in the business and Andrew Boyle identified Blunt. What often sets sleuths off on the wrong trail, however, is the nature of the evidence. Under the Freedom of Information Act in the United ...”

“... bedraggled little band constituted the first official English embassy to India. The flag of St George fluttered above their bivouac. The Ambassador was Sir Thomas Roe, a tough, intelligent, rather prickly man – a kind of blueprint for future administrators of British India. He had been in Mandu six months, grappling with exhaustion and acute ...”

“... For Palestinian artists and intellectuals his murder was ‘a hammer in the head’, as George Ibrahim, head of the Qasaba Theatre in Ramallah, put it. But right-wing commentators in Israel were delighted that a pro-Palestinian celebrity had been killed by a Palestinian. ‘He lived among snakes, and one of them killed him with its bites,’ Yehuda ...”

“... days. Reading Keats’s letters in the latter part of 1931, he encountered the journal-letters to George and Georgiana on the Western frontier of the United States. Eliot earmarked Keats’s strategies: ‘These are trifles – but I require nothing so much of you as that you will give me a like description of yourselves, however it may be when you are ...”