“... His discussion of it, in the chapter on ‘Justice’, is the centrepiece of his book. ‘William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll,’ the song begins, ‘with a cane that he twirled round his diamond ring finger.’ ‘William Zanzinger had 24 years/Owns a tobacco farm of six hundred acres’; Hattie Carroll ...”

“... became a guide and friend to many enlightened, doubtful readers. It was because of the Elegy that James Boswell would, at difficult times, enjoin himself in his journal to ‘Be Gray.’ In literary history Gray is more often an object of curiosity than of admiration. He is known for having not just one of his poems but his poetic language held up to the ...”

“... over ten thousand deaths), it comes to seem probable that the geo-political opening undertaken by William Casey, McFarlane, North and company was nothing less than an attempted coup whose goal was either the fomenting of prolonged instability in Iran or the accession to power of some person or group less hostile to the US and Israel. The man publicly ...”

“... of John Butler Yeats, which had been transcribed, then typed, then donated to the library by William M. Murphy, John Butler Yeats’s biographer. And now I looked up from the Yeats letters to find a man looking at me. It struck me immediately who he was. He was William M. Murphy himself, the author of Prodigal ...”

“... meals proceeded from kitchen to dining room by miniature railway, they owned a London house in St James’s Square, a Highland estate on the island of Jura, and a 16-bedroom seaside ‘cottage’ at Sandwich in Kent. Waldorf and Nancy Astor and their five children somehow found the time to live in all four; worried about the safety of Jura milk, Nancy had her ...”

“... the appearance hereabouts of some parting advice one mother gave to her son, the young Scottish MP James Fergusson, as he set out for Westminster: ‘Never expose yourself, James, to be tried for a rape, for your broad shoulders will cause a jury to think it probable you made the attempt, and your face will make it manifest ...”

“... person of the Undivided Trinity leads to distortions in Art. Thus, in the Sayers scale of values, William Blake is a lop-sided believer in the Father – ‘wrestling with the huge cloudy cosmogonies and highly personal symbolisms of the Prophetic Books’. James Joyce, apparently, was ‘son-ridden’. Ghost-ridden writers ...”

“... them and the Empire is no more. Empire follows Art and not vice versa as Englishmen suppose. William Blake, ‘Annotations to Reynolds’ Blake’s famous remark in the margins of Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses on Art has always mystified me. How could Blake, the fierce ‘prophet against empire’, name his own beloved vocation of ‘Art and ...”

“... of this literature. A sort of boisterous good cheer returns in the world of the medical quacks: James Graham, for example, offered his ‘celestial bed’, a king-sized arena of sexual delight, to voluptuaries (so said his enemies) or to infertile couples (so said he, not a little disingenuously). The steep price of bliss kept the bed out of wide ...”

“... fortifies my soul to know/That, though I perish, Truth is so.’ You must feel uneasy at William James’s claim that ‘ideas ... become true just in so far as they help us to get into satisfactory relations with other parts of our experience.’ You must become indignant when Ryan (accurately paraphrasing Dewey) says that ‘to call a ...”

“... done had he been in love with her! The other man was one who had engaged Stead as his secretary. William Blech – Bill Blake as he was to become – was a New York Jew, autodidact, intellectual, Marxist, and investments manager of a grain firm then operating out of London. When Blake learned, from a disdainful remark of Duncan’s, that his secretary ...”

“... doing something verboten. As a cure for a nervous breakdown, if you can’t afford ‘a Henry James one’, she prescribes shocking the seller at Tiffany by ordering garishly coloured notepaper.Of course, what I ought to have gotten was ‘Ecru-White Kid’ with black engraving or, at worst, dark green or brown script … if it weren’t bad enough that ...”

“... Succeeds’ describes the plotters’ confessed intention, in the chaos following the death of James VI and I in the explosion at Westminster, of abducting his eldest daughter from her governor’s home in Warwickshire. Elizabeth would be placed on the English throne as a puppet sovereign, to be betrothed to a French or Spanish royal suitor and facilitate ...”

“... down the boundaries between art and life. The first Shadows, which no longer exists, seemed to William Pechter ‘closer at times to being that elusive entity, a true slice of life, than almost anything else I can think of which claims the name. There is, in effect, no beginning or end to the film – just middle.’ But Pechter found that ‘this quality ...”