“... attract close attention from Salwak. It is a serious lack; by comparison, the attribution to Henry James of a book called Lesson of the Masters and to Cambridge of a Peterhouse College seem venial slips. Rob Nixon, who lives in New York, is an expatriate South African. Here and there in his book he clearly and reasonably has South Africa in mind, and might ...”

“... counsel to the government when at the bar) – had held on cogently reasoned grounds that the prior authority of an Act of Parliament was required. Nevertheless the Supreme Court sat in full, all 11 members, to hear what even the sober Constitution Unit was calling the case of the century. I began preparing this piece when the judgment was pending, pretty ...”

“... Captain Kirk’s ears which they would have found captivating. Moreover, if it weren’t for our prior enthralment with feline physiognomy the stories that Thomas recounts would be much less absorbing. The interest inspired by the big cats is not exhausted in resolving the explanatory puzzles they raise, or even in the correction of our misconceptions ...”

“... strange and super-human. Crace’s evocations of his sufferings and physical deterioration prior to death and transfiguration are detailed and persuasive, but not strictly accurate. A person who refuses food but who takes water can survive for quite a long time. The Irish hunger-strikers of 1980-1 ceased to feel hunger pangs after the third or fourth ...”

“... British academic life sought then, as perhaps it still does, to detach its participants from prior, alternative, subcultural allegiances. Much of Williams’s work focuses on this culture of deracination and the political consequences that result from the ‘educated’ abandonment of older loyalties. It lies at the very heart of the ‘English’ that ...”

“... was normal to spit black when they coughed. More than a century later, the future politician Chris Prior took off the mask his mother had given him during the 1952 fog and found it coated with a brown goo ‘like Marmite’. Manchester, when I worked there in the 1950s, was not much better, and I grew inured to the black stains left on my handkerchiefs.In the ...”

“... in sunshine on my work table, I discovered in Hope Atherton’s wandering story the authority of a prior life for my own writing voice.’ She goes on to say that her move from Manhattan back to New England in 1972 – she was born in Boston – revived in her an atavistic ardour: ‘This particular landscape, with its granite outcroppings, abandoned ...”

“... have been crimes and torts. This was the analysis put forward by the criminal lawyer and jurist James Fitzjames Stephen, who was retained by the Jamaica Committee in its endeavour to get Eyre and some of his officers convicted. Its attraction as a workable constitutional theory in a common law polity was instantly recognised by Bagehot and by the end of the ...”

“... on the Bankside. What is less well known is the long and troubled story of the Blackfriars theatre prior to 1608, and it is this prologue or prequel that Laoutaris investigates in his energetic and enterprising book. He has done much original research, adding new details to the history of the playhouse, and to our knowledge of Elizabethan and Jacobean ...”

“... and respected. He was fair-minded and decent. Through him, I got to know another seminarian called James Doyle. He would stop and talk if we met in the corridor, even though fraternisation between seminarians and lay students was frowned on. He had many opinions and enjoyed gossip and had a habit of winding me up so I could never quite tell whether he was ...”

“... political insiders: Reagan’s national security adviser John Poindexter, the Clinton strategist James Carville and, later, the disgraced general Mike Flynn, who was Trump’s first national security adviser. Former US government and intelligence officials were hired to fill executive and advisory roles. In 2009, the company won its first big commercial ...”

“... isn’t the person I married,’ and one doesn’t need to be unwell to feel what Henry James felt, writing to Rhoda Broughton in November 1915 after she had praised one of (what he called) his ‘old perpetrations’: ‘I think of it, the masterpiece in question, as the work of quite another person than myself, at this date – that of a rich (so ...”

“... by lyric, but can also be made to reimagine our times. Even A.A. Milne’s ‘Disobedience’ (‘James James/Morrison Morrison/Weatherby George Dupree’), though it’s unlikely to change the world very much, may use the allure of its rhythm to make us wonder what James’s mother might actually have been doing when ...”

“... if she was going to teach and she said: ‘Good God, no. I’m going to be a writer.’ ‘Mr Prior,’ she recalled, ‘thought I was a spoilt arrogant hussy – which I was.’ It was at the end of her time at Cambridge that she got her own first ‘dusty answer’. She fell for the dashing David Keswick, who seemed so ‘very, very smitten’ that ...”

“... that the sidebar on Bloomsbury neglects to mention that it was the Hogarth Press that sponsored James Strachey’s translation of Freud, beginning in 1924. Gertrude Stein receives her own sidebar, only to be marginalised as a collector of Picassos, with no mention of her own groundbreaking experiments in literary genre and poetics. The most serious ...”