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“... perfumes and modern marinades. Taking oil from an olive is like making love to a woman, says one miller after another, as if each of them has thought it up for himself. At Nuñez de Prado in Spain they seem to have the gentlest touch. Breaking with local tradition, they ‘milk’ the branches, picking the fruit off one by one instead of thwacking the trees ...”

“... a ‘makar’. A century later in his how-to-be-a-king book, the Basilikon Doron, the versifying James VI of Scotland claimed that he had ‘not spared to play the bairde against all the estaitis of my kingdome’. When James boarded the English throne in 1603, his Scots had to be translated for English readers to whom the ...”

“... On 23 January 1894, Henry James entered in his notebook two stories told to him by Lady Gregory, whom he had met first in Rome 15 years earlier. She had given one of them to him, he wrote, as a plot, and ‘saw more in it than, I confess, I do myself’. ‘At any rate,’ he went on, ‘Lady G.’s story was that of an Irish squire who discovered his wife in an intrigue ...”

“... An onlooker’, Clive James writes in North Face of Soho (2006), the fourth instalment of his memoirs, ‘might say that I have Done Something. But I’m still not entirely sure about the “something”, and not at all sure about the “I” … Who is this character?’ James’s CV takes a while to unpack even if you aren’t its owner, and it doesn’t help that people’s perceptions of him vary according to nationality and, above all, age ...”

“... delivering him back at his flat I found that, even before I got home, I had started to cry. Karl Miller writes: A few weeks ago I visited Frank in Cambridge. I had known him for 52 years, and for much of that time I had been his editor, publishing him first in 1958, when he was a lecturer at Reading University. In a style of the period, I was warned against ...”

“... about this undoubtedly American poet. He is the justified sinner whom we meet in the fiction of James Hogg. And he is the superman, the Stavrogin, whom we meet in the fiction of Dostoevsky: the antinomian hero bent both on power and mischief and on the blessedness of the meek, so that he’s Prince Myshkin too, and it’s hardly surprising that he should ...”

“... James Hunter​ ’s work has analysed with utter thoroughness the culture of the Highlands and the diaspora that was forced on it. In his latest book, Set Adrift upon the World, he doesn’t try to describe, in a novelist’s or a journalist’s way, how individuals suffered and grieved and retaliated. Rather, he lays out the way systematic dispossession was managed, legally, by the class who engineered the process and who did so for their own gain ...”

“... Day, tenacious as a badger; Ludovic Kennedy, whose line is artistic, faintly raffish melancholy; James Mossman, the ardent Galahad who will never take for granted that men are sometimes wicked on purpose; Robert Kee, the hot-eyed public prosecutor … When John Birt arrived at the BBC as Deputy Director-General at the end of the 1980s, apocalyptic ...”

“... When, in the summer of 1898, at the age of 56, William James went to Berkeley, California to deliver a series of lectures on pragmatism, he could have used his own life to illustrate the immensely difficult but successful application of one of its tenets: that truth is best seen as ‘what it is better for us to believe’, not as ‘as an accurate representation of reality’, and that what is better for us to believe is what can be ascertained only in and through our actions, not by consultation with fixed ideas or traditions or, notably in his case, by family example ...”

“... of the Smith resolve), he met a young milliner, Anne Longden. She was the daughter of a local miller, far beneath him in fortune and rank. He made her his mistress, and Barbara Leigh Smith was the first of the five children she bore him. He did not marry Anne. The more fastidious Smiths including Florence Nightingale’s well-to-do parents, were never ...”

“... The novel has been the subject of much talk since its publication in America. In the New Yorker, James Wood noted the ‘eerie confidence’ of the storytelling. ‘It ripples,’ he said, ‘with stories, anecdotes, set-piece monologues, crafty egotistical tall tales and hapless adventures.’ In Salon, Laura Miller said ...”

“... the High Court’s ruling that ministers could not lawfully use the royal prerogative to leave the EU, many lawyers, myself included, thought it a hopeless enterprise. A court of three judges – the Chief Justice, the Master of the Rolls and Lord Justice Sales (who had been standing counsel to the government when at the bar) – had held on cogently reasoned ...”

“... half-approving interest in such persons, real or imaginary, who could be called by this name: James Hogg was described by a fellow dualistic writer as a ‘strange compound of genius and imbecility’. In the course of the 18th century the strange mixture was on the way to becoming the divided self of the romantics, and to suggesting some conflict of ...”

“... Wendell Holmes (72). A. C. Benson (67), Sherwood Anderson (64), George Santayana (61), Henry Miller (56), Emerson (55), William James (49), Nietzsche (46) and Anaïs Nin (40). These are only the familiar names; the unknown table-talkers, maxim-mongers and cracker-barrel wiseacres buttonhole the reader hardly less ...”

“... one feature one can create a whole new face.’ By the time he was playing Shylock for Jonathan Miller, his only protection was a set of specially-made teeth (in the still, oddly enough, he looks like a handsome version of Ken Tynan on the facing page). Miller had persuaded him to jettison a more complicated Jewish ...”