“... religious history, of Jacobitism and the previous abortive attempts to restore the descendants of James II to the throne. Instead we go straight into a military encounter, the Battle of Prestonpans, on 21 September 1745. ‘Two armies were moving to contact in the country to the east of Edinburgh’ is the book’s first sentence: the armies are the Jacobite ...”

“... was the least productive in the world’s terms, someone whose art simply produced herself: Alice James, sister of Henry and William, Alice with her ‘squalid indigestions’, her ‘spinal neurosis’ and her ‘stomachic gout’. Between them the James siblings shared a hospital full ...”

“... Put briefly, his theme runs thus. The city fathers, defenders of monarchy, not Parliament, under James I, and again allied to the Crown from the autumn of 1641, were nevertheless temporarily ‘alienated’ from their natural ally during the 1630s. The City was estranged as a result of Royal attacks on municipal and corporate privileges which have long ...”

“... form and essence of culture. He is end and beginning, both cedar tree and ‘A per se’. And as James Kinsley suggests, Virgil’s best translators acquire something of his luminous stature: ‘the ancient author becomes culturally effective, and the translator a “noble collateral” with him.’ Henry Howard, Earl of ...”

“... to Harold Hayes’s soft-core liberal stronghold at Esquire, and from a Jesuit seminary to the Henry Luce Chair of American Culture and Public Policy at Northwestern University? At its worst, however, Wills’s book is merely a tawdry broadside, returning with too much pleasure to scandals uncovered by others with too little caution. The pilgrim dips his ...”

“... Mask album (1982) from Lou Reed, a student of Schwartz’s at Syracuse in the early Sixties. And James Atlas’s sensitive biography, published in 1977, provides an exhilarating mass of circumstantial evidence about Schwartz’s day-to-day existence. But the best introduction to his achievement remains his extraordinary first book. He really was onto ...”

“... his language – Podhoretz’s writing is almost always elegantly phrased and supple, closer to Henry James than to Damon Runyon – that he likes to announce his lower-class affiliations. There is a pattern of such sartorial signals, running from childhood to maturity. In Ex-Friends, he is proud to report a sartorial victory for his class during an ...”

“... is gothic in mood, but has a plainness and tact. Sometimes, in these pages, one wishes for what Henry James (apropos of Poe) called ‘the indispensable history of somebody’s normal relation to something’.The best​ of the stories stand out because they slip the noose and allow contingency into their version of things. Henri Thomas’s ‘The ...”

“... she ‘enticed this small dog’ to mate with her and later produced puppies. In 1792, Lieutenant Henry Ball anchored the HMS Supply in Plymouth. It seems the ship was misnamed – supplies had been short on its latest voyage, and the crew had eaten some of the kangaroos they were carrying. Three unappetising ones survived, two of which were presented to ...”

“... and more fashionable as the century advanced. As early as 1744, Caroline Lennox had eloped with Henry Fox, later Lord Holland and father of Charles James. It was a sensible move as he was far more exciting than his three future brothers-in-law, one of whom – Mr Conolly as a matter of fact – was so boring that the ...”

“... and tried to keep the Pacific as a private lake. Only a few years before this the terrible Henry Morgan, whose exploits and enormous plunder make Kidd’s dwindle into insignificance, had been knighted and made lieutenant-governor of Jamaica. The buccaneers came from all the maritime nations and the mixed crew often agreed very well: but in 1689 ...”

“... Blacks in Britain was held in the same year, at the University of London. Studies by Peter Fryer, James Walvin and David Dabydeen appeared in the next few years. Fryer, whose Staying Power is still the most detailed – and most often consulted – account of the subject, gave more than two hundred talks and lectures at adult education centres, schools and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... connections between the Scottish and the English dimensions of the ecclesiastic policies of James I, both of them, Russell suggests, shaped largely by the King’s wish for a solution – an eirenic Calvinist episcopalianism – that would be acceptable in both kingdoms. No less stimulating, if no less tenuous, is the thesis that Charles I had a ...”

“... in check and prevent a demagogue, perhaps beholden to a foreign government, rising to power. James Madison had a more self-interested objection to popular election. The political power of the South, where slaves made up 40 per cent or more of the population, had hugely increased, thanks to a clause adding three-fifths of the slave population to the ...”