“... private friends, any private life. George Spater quotes from some notes made by Cobbett’s son, James, who was projecting a biography but found the task difficult, as well he might. In 1865, James wrote of his father: He had but little individual attachment. Liked people’s company; – they liked his (when he was ...”

“... traffic, occasionally lost, and at the end of ‘Fastest on Earth’ she gets a parking fine in St James’s Square. Many of the pleasures are urban and precisely located in the area around Macaulay’s Bloomsbury flat off Chancery Lane, but there are rural pleasures too. In ‘Easter in the Woods’ she contemplates a finely detailed landscape as she lingers ...”

“... Doherty had been shot in the back deliberately was not even considered by Lord Widgery. The dying Gerald Donaghey, one of four unarmed men gunned down as they tried to avoid the soldiers’ fire in Glenfada Park, was carried into a house. In a sustained effort to find out who he was, all his pockets were carefully inspected. There was nothing in them. Neither ...”

“... The Craft of Fiction (1921). Having studied this ultra-Jamesian tract, the bright young Gerald Mills and John Boon determined that ‘viewpoint’ was the main ingredient in narrative and that their romances ‘should always be written from the heroine’s point of view, in order to promote identification and increase interest and suspense’. The ...”

“... Some of the best buildings are those which record pure Yankee ingenuity: the Octagon Barn of the James L. and Cora Purdy Farm, for example, which is 100 feet in diameter and has 48 foot high walls – a machine for automated cattle-feeding. And there are things which might be ignored if they did not take place on an American scale, like the Breughelish scene ...”

“... mores is compounded when he takes the son of a gangster for a lover. Helen had met Claude through Gerald, her landlord, partially crippled after a garden hose was forced into his rectum as punishment for his violations of Cajun propriety – and his only offence had been to write poetry about life on the bayou. Helen’s exposure to such violence makes her ...”

“... Keynes recalled a ‘dreadful discussion which almost killed us’, when they were divided over Gerald Shove. Not everyone was happy to join. From James Strachey’s letters, Lubenow takes a wonderful account of the nearly botched election of Gordon Luce in 1912; asked to meet the Apostles at breakfast, ‘Luce looked ...”

“... candidate for measurement) Fothergill says, ‘I think you must be Mr J.M. Barrie,’ to which Sir James, ‘slyly’, says: ‘You are not far wrong.’ Harold Acton, with his ‘Big Ben’ voice, presides at the last dinner of Oxford’s banned Hypocrites’ Club, which ends in much goat-like leaping about, the sort of conduct which would not have been ...”

“... one. Had Her Majesty gone for another duff read, an early George Eliot, say, or a late Henry James, novice reader that she was she might have been put off reading for good and there would be no story to tell. Books, she would have thought, were work. As it was, with this one she soon became engrossed and, passing her bedroom that night clutching his ...”

“... snobs and sports are by no means all boastful or complicit. The supreme text of recent years is James Fox’s account of Lord Lucan and his set, with their boffes de politesse. There is a touch of Lucanian zombiness in The Monument, and the peer himself takes part in The Passion of John Aspinall. Patrician insolence has quite often appeared to express a ...”

“... part is the Irish word dáire, meaning ‘wooded island’. The London prefix dates from 1613 when James 1 granted a charter to the Society of Governors and Assistants, London, of the New Plantation of Ulster, known then and now as the Honourable The Irish Society. The Hon. The Irish Society was strictly a business proposition, like the East India Company, and ...”

“... are inseparable from any serious thinking about literature. The fact may have a bearing on Gerald Graff’s claim in Professing Literature that the present warfare over theory is a replay of all previous academic disputes about the teaching of literature since English studies were first introduced as a university subject. His book makes some telling ...”

“... a drum in a jungle.’ It is good to learn from the recent engaging memoir by Hughes’s brother, Gerald, that the young boy had a tom-tom hidden in the local woods on which he would happily bash away. Eliot was giving the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard when he made the comment about the savage and the drum, a context which must make some ...”

“... medical professor Hermann Boerhaave and the German Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland in the 18th century. James Copeland, an English medical authority who was quoted as late as the 20th century on ‘the transference of vital power’, warned that young women married to old men suffered debilitation and shortened longevity: ‘These facts are often well known to the ...”

“... minister of transport, at the civil engineering company Eiffage. When the cabinet was announced, James McAuley wrote in the Washington Post that ‘Macron’s “radical centrism” sure looks a lot like conservatism.’ More significant, though less visible, were the choices of chiefs of staff and senior administrators who had occupied similar positions ...”