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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Robert Montgomery during Chandler’s lifetime, and afterwards by Elliot Gould, Robert Mitchum and James Garner. He was the hero of the most listened to radio detective serial in history, and, by the time Chandler died in 1959, had sold over five million books. The private eye was the wilderness hero moved to the urban frontier, alone and unattached, living ...”

“... He​ does not feed like a mongoose,’ James Irving said of the talking mongoose that had taken up residence – or so it was said – in his remote Isle of Man farmhouse in the early 1930s. Irving told psychic investigators that his family had tried the mongoose – who went by the name of ‘Gef’ – on bread and milk, only to have their food rejected ...”

“... concentrates itself into a complicated meditation on the ethics and aesthetics of biography. James (‘Jimbo’) Petworth Lampitt is an Edwardian belletristic biographer who has done a stylish life of Prince Albert. He is hero-worshipped by Julian’s clergyman uncle Roy, the whole of whose life has been an act of fawning homage to the Lampitt family. He ...”

“... and the lesson it taught him, has remained with him throughout his scientific life. Always a hunter, he extols the joys of the chase in the manner of a 19th-century squire, except that for Wilson the prey are ants and the race is won by the first to identify a species, or to discover a nest in a locale not previously known, or to explain the cause of ...”

“... how Boorman ended up in Soho one night discussing a bad script from a Donald Westlake novel, The Hunter, with Marvin, who was staying in London. ‘What do you think?’ Marvin wanted to know. Boorman said it was clichéd; they bonded over considering it ‘a piece of shit’.That was the start of Point Blank. Boorman thought the central character, then ...”