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“... just where they were going to put them anyway. But some recent research by Robert Goodin and James Mahmud Rice suggests that something more complicated might be going on.* The polls, they reveal, don’t fluctuate in the run-up to an election because respondents are simply humouring the pollsters with the pretence that their opinions are shifting ...”

“... of fiction.’ This remark probably arose from his habitual disrespect for, or worry about, Henry James. The Ambassadors is given more attention in Aspects of the Novel than any other novel, except possibly Gide’s Les Faux-Monnayeurs, though the intention is in neither case to praise or to admire; and the Commonplace Book contains mildly disparaging remarks ...”

“... had been published in 1933. He took up with writers like Philip Hamburger, S.J. Perelman and James Thurber, but his best friend at the magazine was A.J. Liebling, with whom he developed a relationship of affectionate rivalry. Liebling, who died in 1963, was an ebullient man, renowned among other things for his tremendous speed and brilliance as a ...”

“... to further his suit. There survives a quaint picture of the pair taken in a photographer’s booth in Cologne in February 1902, framed in the window of a fake railway carriage supposedly travelling from Berlin to Brussels to London; Apollinaire holds her by the elbow, and they certainly look like a courting or even betrothed couple, but quite how far the ...”

“... It was a hymn to the glories of free trade and the spirit of Adam Smith, almost as baroque as James Thornhill’s enormous ceiling with its allegories of Time Exposing Truth and other desirable outcomes. A fine piece of Boris bravura, if you overlooked the fact that, during the heyday he was hymning, Britain, like many rapidly industrialising ...”

“... Martin Amis had a few reservations about the book’s popularity with scholarly intermediaries. James Joyce, he concluded, ‘could have been the most popular boy in the school, the funniest, the cleverest, the kindest. He ended up with a more ambiguous distinction: he became the teacher’s pet.’ How is Amis getting on in this notional academy? In ...”

“... and grown. It was being expanded when the marchers came at Christmas; it now had a passport booth, a partially paved footpath around the side of the main road, a payphone, steel benches for those whose identity cards aroused suspicion, and tons of concrete to protect Israeli soldiers. Israeli workers, who were connecting electricity wires to a new kiosk ...”

“... recall who got there first, or how, but at one point we were both roaring through the novels of James Buchan and when we sat down to lunch together could barely contain our enthusiasm, like a couple of teenage girls gushing about a cute new boy at school. During our final lunch, the Thursday before the Sunday he died, we discussed the anthology ...”

“... at almost every turn. Even the names have a story to tell, sometimes, perhaps the best being ‘BOOTH, Mrs [Eliza Margaret J.] Otto Von (‘Rita’, later Mrs Desmond Humphreys, née Gollan, 1860?-1938)’. The abundance and range of concerns and tendencies in the period is amply reflected: movements and positions like ...”

“... reflection. This, for Toussaint, is the real object of all mediation: thought. Sitting in a photo booth, and finding the conditions ‘perfect … for thinking’, the same narrator recalls the rain that he was watching, seconds earlier, move through a ‘shining cone of light to the neighbouring darkness’: Rain seemed to me to represent the course of ...”

“... held in celebration of the conquest of Algiers.The Tortuous Streets of Arles: Henry JamesHenry James, visiting in about 1883, in writing about Arles, complains about the streets – he calls them ‘tortuous and featureless’ just as Murray in his Handbook, some thirty years earlier, had described them as forming ‘a labyrinth of dirty narrow ...”

“... by the great swordsmith Yasukuni of the Soshu Branch of the Sagami School’). The best that Clive James – a regular visitor and student of Japanese – could come up with was the smirking comedy Brrm! Brrm! Only two novelists have filtered Japanese characters into English with any conviction, and neither of them has made a home in the country: Kazuo ...”

“... the best he could get, in January 1938, was to be appointed Ambassador to the Court of St James. It was a strange appointment, especially given FDR’s inclinations towards intervention and Kennedy’s belief that appeasement was the only way to keep the peace, a view he had held long before he arrived in London. He occasionally consorted with ...”

“... to the secular as well as religious needs of their congregations. The social investigator Charles Booth thought they were ‘lenient judges of the frailties that are not sins, and of the disorder that is not crime’. In 1843, the temperance advocate Father Mathew administered the pledge to some penitents who were actually ‘in a state of intoxication’ and ...”

“... less grandiose American writers have achieved such quiet splendours of chronicle, whether it’s Booth Tarkington in The Magnificent Ambersons describing the ‘little bunty streetcar’ pulled by a mule along a track that wove its way among the cobblestones, whose passengers got out and pushed if the mule strayed from the track, or E.B. White in his essay ...”