“... criticism in five words or fewer: on her third quarto of Othello, ‘a sad one’; on her copy of James Shirley’s The Constant Maid, or Love Will Find Out the Way, ‘I doe not lik this.’ Across the start of Eastward Hoe, the very funny city comedy by George Chapman, Ben Jonson and John Marston, she wrote ‘prity one’, then crossed it ...”

“... redeemed and ruined by a single quixotic fixation, recurs again and again in the plots of Henry James. Events and situations continually arose which seem to cry out for fictional treatment: one example is the threatened arrival in the midst of it all of a ten-year-old stepdaughter whom Wallis had never met (‘You can imagine the discomfort it will cause in ...”

“... samples from all of them back to America for analysis of their DNA and found a young scientist, James Gusella, who was eager to search for the gene, even though the chances of finding it seemed remote. Against all odds, however, he and his collaborators succeeded in locating it on one specific human chromosome, although no one has yet been able to pinpoint ...”

“... the next speech plainly follows directly from them and not from the line that precedes the cut: BISHOP: Fear not my lord. The power that made you king Hath power to keep you king in spite of all. The means that heavens yield must be embraced And not neglected; else heaven would, And we will not; heaven’s offer we refuse, The proffer’d means of ...”

“... By a bizarre twist, G.K. Chesterton may be en route to sanctity: it was reported in August that the Bishop of Northampton has begun a suit for his canonisation. Diarmaid MacCulloch doesn’t invoke Chesterton’s miracle-working powers, but he opens this expanded version of his 2012 Gifford Lectures with a Father Brown story, ‘The Oracle of the Dog’: by howling at a certain time, the animal gives the priestly sleuth the clue to the murder weapon ...”

“... English realism was a gain rather than a loss, as was its eventual freedom from British rule. When James Joyce wrote to a friend that ‘it is my revolt against the English conventions, literary and otherwise, that is the main source of my talent,’ he spoke for many more Irish writers than himself. Yet to be free of a convention is not to ignore it. Wilde ...”

“... North-West. They had been running Westmorland like a giant pocket borough since the heyday of Sir James (‘Wicked Jimmy’) Lowther, 1st earl of Lonsdale: a man Thomas De Quincey called ‘a true Feudal Chieftain’, notorious for his ‘gloomy temper and habits of oppression’. Wicked Jimmy went to a better (or worse) place in 1802, at which point the ...”

“... James Thurber’s best-known cartoon has an impassive little man introducing his spouse to a dazed friend with ‘That’s My First Wife Up There, and This Is the Present Mrs Harris.’ The first Mrs Harris seems to be crouched on all fours on the top of a very high (glazed) bookcase, just behind the second Mrs Harris ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... This is the first full-length study of James Thomson’s life and work since Henry Salt’s in 1889. Thomson’s poem The City of Dreadful Night is known by name to many but has seldom been reprinted or discussed. Histories of literature say more about an earlier James Thomson (1700-48) who wrote The Seasons and ‘Rule Britannia’ and got into Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, though Johnson says his diction was ‘florid and luxuriant ...”

“... with the accurate prediction that ‘he was a very clever fellow, but that he would never be a bishop.’ Smith was bored by the country, but was exiled for most of his career to rural livings – at Foston in Yorkshire and Combe Florey in Somerset – for all that he was relished by the Whig leaders who were in power in the early 1830s, and despite his ...”

“... the story is a medieval legend based on selective reading of a misinformed passage of a Visigothic bishop of Seville.) One might gather from all this self-praise that our narrator is a rather preening, proud and boastful slave, a type well known from ancient comedy, but in fact he has no personality at all and in the heat of the moment even the flimsiest ...”

“... a vicar in Sussex, became briefly famous when he wrote a book called God in Us. Freeman’s bishop put him on probation for a year, and then asked him to leave the Church. He was right to do so. The Sea of Faith priests like to talk as if they have dealt with the problem of religious unbelief by deconstructing God’s existence. In fact, they are merely ...”

“... In November 1907​ William James, professor of philosophy at Harvard, received an invitation from Oxford. It came from Manchester College – now Harris Manchester and a college of the university, but then an autonomous dissenting institution with a strong Unitarian character, recently relocated from London: its business was to cater to Nonconformist students who were still barred from Oxford ...”

“... Honourable Artillery Company, was a devout Christian who launched the Hammer House of Horror (Sir James Carreras). All demonstrated that a spell in uniform, as the sovereign’s trusty and well-beloved, never cramped a creative talent, and perhaps that a creative talent never cramped a military one. The singularity of their careers has earned them a place ...”