“... his opponent was saying exhibited the profound conviction of his own beliefs. Did not the poet King David say: ‘Let them be ashamed and confounded that seek after my soul: let them be turned backward and put to confusion, that desire my hurt’? Individualism, bordering on eccentricity, even to the extent of ‘cutting off your nose to spite your ...”

“... its ancestry back to the legendary Lucius Junius Brutus who had supposedly expelled the last king of Rome, Tarquinius Superbus, in 510 bc, and served as one of the first consuls (the highest elected official in the new Republic) the following year. Brutus was proud of his heritage: he had his family tree painted in the atrium of his house, plotting his ...”

“... it’s well known. Dylan is among the (male) English (language) poets here: the translators of the King James Bible, Shakespeare, Donne, Marlowe, Herbert, Milton, Marvell, Pope, Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, Hardy, Kipling, Yeats, Eliot, Larkin, Berryman, Stevens, Frost – all figure prominently. Much of what Ricks has to say on this ...”

“... of my flesh, she will be called woman because she is taken out of man.’ This is why, as the King James Bible has it, ‘a man shall cleave to his wife: and they shall be one flesh’ – surely the best use of the word ‘cleave’, which means both to join together and to split apart. Neither fusion​ nor repetition can hold together this ...”

“... funding to Ark’s schools. In 2012, when his proposal to send a leatherbound copy of the King James Bible to every state school in the UK was nixed by David Cameron on grounds of cost, Marshall was among those who stepped in to foot the £370,000 bill. The following year, Gove appointed him lead non-executive director in the Department of ...”

“... the first to receive his co-operation over the complete, ten-year span of its writing. The author, James Atlas, whose biography of Delmore Schwartz appeared in 1977 and who is the general editor of the Penguin Lives Series, was given full access to Bellow’s letters and unpublished manuscripts and final permission to quote all the passages he wanted to ...”

“... and colleague of Edwin Chadwick, who found his match in the equally expansive (canon-wise) James Crossley – a more cautious and cunning operator, the extent of whose activities as a corpus-sweller has not been fully apparent until now. Furbank and Owens suggest that Chalmers was both accident-prone and obstinately credulous – witness his eager ...”

“... on irony and play, as Milan Kundera repeatedly remarks, and T.S. Eliot meant to praise Henry James by suggesting he had a mind so fine no idea could violate it. We might say the same of dozens of other novelists. Plenty of ideas, but none of them nailed down, all of them implicated in other, conflicting ideas; and there are novelists who have scarcely ...”

“... With his first earnings as a garden labourer, the boy walked to Aberdeen and bought six volumes of James Hervey’s Reflections on a Flower Garden – just as Clare had tramped from Helpston to Stamford, before the bookshop opened, to secure a coveted copy of James Thomson’s The Seasons. And like Clare, Sinclair paused on ...”

“... Bend in the River); and monstrous post-colonial abuse had followed. He didn’t actually say that King Leopold, bad though he was, was probably not much worse than Mobutu, or Idi Amin, or Mugabe, but he allowed one to think it. And when he sought to expose what he called ‘the great lie’ about colonialism by emphasising the miscegenation and transgressive ...”

“... several examples of slaves who named their children after Dunmore, offered praise to the distant king or identified themselves as Britons whenever their free status was challenged. But the actions of the British during the Revolution did not demonstrate a consistent or durable commitment to black freedom. Lord Dunmore and his successors refused to free the ...”

“... of exploration and scientific achievement in England between two celebrated voyages, Captain James Cook’s first circumnavigation of the world in the Endeavour in the late 1760s and Charles Darwin’s expedition to the Galapagos in the 1830s. William and Caroline Herschel’s advances in astronomy and Humphry Davy’s in chemistry dominate both ...”

“... He asked the inevitable questions and grimaced when she told him her favourite writer was Henry James. ‘He asked me if I rewrote a lot and said you should never revise, never change anything, not even a word. He regretted all the rewriting he’d done on The Town and the City. No one could make him do that again.’ Kerouac soon put Glassman in a ...”

“... How can we know Samuel Johnson without summoning him through the reanimating power of James Boswell’s Life? For the many scholars, writers, readers and collectors who call themselves Johnsonians, this is the near impossible task. Boswell first met Johnson in 1763, in the back parlour of a bookshop. It belonged to a friend of Johnson, Thomas ...”

“... examples, such as John Barth’s ‘Petition’ from Lost in the Funhouse, addressed to the King of Siam. The novel is not, contrary to confused assertions in the Indian press, another attempt at a form of Indian magical realism in the wake of Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy. No one has telepathic or supernatural powers here; time is broadly Newtonian ...”