“... structured and moral environment’ – a proposition to which he agrees enthusiastically: ‘I said, “I think it solves everything.”’ Ludo’s voice has already asserted itself, first as petulant interruptions, then as entries in a journal. It will soon take over the narrative.Having found out shortly after his eleventh birthday who his biological ...”

“... scene of the killing to be found guilty and sent to jail,’ Detective Inspector John McFarlane said after the conviction of 17 of the 20 young people jointly charged with the murder of 15-year-old Sofyen Belamouadden at Victoria Station in March 2010: ‘the law on joint enterprise is clear and unforgiving.’ To be found guilty of murder as an individual ...”

“... basis of evangelical humanism, in which – to use his formulation – everything well and piously said or done, even by pagans, is referred to Christ, everything, in other words, is judged first by the standard of ancient wisdom and eloquence, and then by the Christian. To this time belong The Institution of Christian Marriage for Katherine of Aragon, On ...”

“... of quarts of blackberries in his arms, picked with the morning dew, five hundred miles away.’ Edward Dorn.) Even Ben Watson, whose poodle parlour is wall to wall with off-piste names, admits (in conversation) that he has never been introduced to Woolf’s work: ‘My book’s sub-plot is Philip K. Dick, sales-talk, Hollywood and schitzophrenia.’ So ...”

“... a discussion on whether to award the duke the freedom of a City company, one London alderman had said: ‘Then let it be of the Butchers!’ In later years, distaste hardened into suspicion that Cumberland might be plotting a military coup and his own dictatorship. Walpole thought this was rubbish. ‘It is uncertain whether his inordinate passion for war ...”

“... Surely he settled into a last tranquil silence only because in The Tempest he had deliberately said his last word? As early as 1667 Dryden was identifying Shakespeare with Prospero, and the notion of The Tempest as the farewell of a magus to his art has been a commonplace ever since Edward Dowden published Shakspere ...”

“... Edward​ Long arrived ‘home’ in the ‘mother country’ in 1769 with his wife and three young children after 12 years as a planter in Jamaica. His return presented no problems. He was a colonist, a ‘freeborn Englishman’, welcomed back to ‘his’ country. His wife came, as he did, from an elite white dynasty and his children, though they were born in Jamaica, inherited his birthright ...”

“... towel, spare glove, umbrella and so on, has to be loaded into a bag the size of a portmanteau. Edward VII owned one made out of the skin of an elephant’s penis, a gift from a maharajah. There’s more than a grain of paradox in this reliance on manufacture. Golf is the most pastoral of games. Its contests take place among rolling hills or in a ...”

“... Deputy Foreign Affairs Minister, who regards EO as a poor ambassador for the new South Africa, has said that he would like to see an end to it. Barlow, however, likes to argue that relations with the Government are not so bad and that the bulk of South African opposition to EO comes from members of the old guard – Military Intelligence and other elements of ...”

“... biographers pay too little attention, the words of his second wife, Elizabeth Hardwick. She said that ‘texts had been his life.’ A tycoon’s widow might equally say, and in the same spirit, that ‘money had been his life.’ The sharpest point that Marjorie Perloff makes is to quote from Ian Hamilton’s biography of Lowell, recalling his ...”

“... sympathies, as many ‘conformable puritans’ did in that period. Some biographers believe, as Edward Jones notes in his learned overview of archives relating to the young poet, that Milton lost sympathy with orthodox worship when an inspection of Horton parish church in 1637 required that the raised pew occupied by the Milton family should be lowered and ...”

“... of a real-life marriage. Scandalised critics called Froude a muckraker and traitor. Tennyson said he’d sold his master for thirty pieces of silver. Froude was mortified but unrepentant. He was used to controversy. James Anthony Froude by George Reid, 1881. The Life was a homemade bomb; the History was a meteorite, a bolide from somewhere remote ...”

“... What do​ the fish call Muhammad? One of his earliest disciples said that different creatures called him by different names. He was known as Abd al-Quddus under the sea and Abd al-Ghaffar among the birds, Abd al-Mughis in the insect kingdom and Abd al-Rahim to the jinn.‘His name is Ahmad,’ Jesus said of the one who would come after him, according to the Quran ...”

“... Pearl Kazin (Alfred Kazin’s sister) was an editor at Harper’s Bazaar and her manner was said to be quite superior. She deployed it over the years to get American novelists to jump through hoops. And when she asked Mailer if he’d care to contribute something to her magazine we can now be grateful to Lennon for bringing us the following ...”

“... everything’ – while there are several books about women who ‘knew too much’. It’s often said that some quite ordinary people ‘know everything’, but that usually comes with qualifications too: you can ‘know everything’ if you win pub quizzes, or you can ‘know everything’ about birdwatching, or baking cakes, or The Archers. But the ...”