“... serendipity. Apart from anything else, it is deeply unfair that it should. In Seeing like a State, James Scott is definitely in storytelling mode, though he seems unaware of the narrative biases that result. (It makes me curious to know what he’s like when he travels by air, which as an anthropologist he must do quite often.) He has two kinds of story to ...”

“... then on jurisprudence, between 1748 and 1751. The prime mover behind the lectures was the advocate Henry Home (soon to be elevated to the judicial bench as Lord Kames), a sharp reminder, not least to Smith’s modern-day devotees, of the significant role played by patronage in the Scottish Enlightenment. Indeed, nepotism thrived in the academic dynasties of ...”

“... unusual is that he seems barely to adjudicate significance; he’s like a child who has taken Henry James’s injunction to novelists – ‘be one of the people on whom nothing is lost’ – literally; he appears to just write down everything he can recall (and he appears to recall everything). It’s easy to marshal examples of what makes My ...”

“... the banks of the River Loddon with views across the valley, from the 12th century until 1531, when Henry VIII granted William Paulet a licence to rebuild. A feudal castle evolved into a stately home fit for royalty, said to be ‘the greatest of any subject’s house in England’. Its nickname, Loyalty House – after the marquess of Winchester’s motto ...”

“... to as ‘a sycophant’. He is similarly tough with Stanley Hoffman for being too respectful of Henry Kissinger. Hitchens is at his best when on the attack. He can’t stand Cyril Connolly, whom he sees as a precious old reactionary: ‘another dose of the familiar compound ... some rackety travelling, a tincture of furtive sex (with much sniggering about ...”

“... have recently provided the material for works by artists as different from each other as P.D. James, DV8 Physical Dance Theatre and David Lynch. Stephen Egger, an American academic and former policeman who wrote the first doctoral dissertation on the phenomenon, gives a definition/description of serial murder in Serial Murder: An Elusive Phenomenon: A ...”

“... usury. Within prescribed limits as to the level of interest, it had been legal since the time of Henry VIII, but it was a sin, and best left to the inhabitants of the ghetto, though they too were forbidden by their religion to practise it, except (Deuteronomy 23.20) on strangers. That Shakespeare wants the audience to be thinking about these matters is ...”

“... omits.Crippen, meanwhile, was turning into a spiv. By early 1894, he had started working for James Monroe Munyon, a ‘professor’ – the title was his own – who made his fortune selling ‘Munyon’s Remedies’, which he advertised as ‘a cure for every disease’. Crippen was soon transferred to the head office in Philadelphia, where he was one ...”

“... greatness and purpose, through the values elicited from the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales and Henry IV Part One, Keats’s Odes and Tom Jones, Emma and Tess. It is still happening, even after we have got historians to stop drilling them in the battles we won, and when geographers no longer offer them maps in which the Empire is coloured red. Penguin ...”

“... computer and the cellular telephone’ as ‘the latest of the new toys’. The conduct of ‘Henry Ford, with dictatorial power over his business’ was preferable. No committee would have acted like Ford when he dared ‘to create a mass market for automobiles by arbitrarily setting his prices low enough and his wages high enough so that his workers ...”

“... involve him with a villain called Richard Craufurd, whom Bulwer-Lytton based on the banker Henry Fauntleroy, who had been hanged for forgery before a crowd of 100,000 people at Newgate in 1824. The central male figure in Lucretia is an artist, murderer and forger called Gabriel Varney, who was reworked from elements in the life of the forger-poisoner ...”

“... which Protestant England could never hope to lay claim (although before the separation from Rome Henry VIII had made a somewhat forlorn bid to have himself elected Holy Roman Emperor). But if the British Empire could not hope to rival the prestige of Spain, it could compete on an equal footing in the Americas. As one spokesman for the Virginia Company put ...”

“... had been cut off. It turned out to be a false economy on the Duke’s part. Yet to say, as James Laver did, introducing the 1929 edition, that there was ‘no creative impulse’ behind the Memoirs is quite untrue. Once she got going Harriette Wilson clearly wrote for the pleasure of writing. Many of the people she depicts are obscure; she simply ...”

“... Anyone who knew or knew of James Lees-Milne in his later years might have formed the impression of an exquisitely polished round peg in a perfectly round hole. Aesthete, diarist, wit, he had known everyone from the Mitfords to Mick Jagger and wrote about them amusingly. His work for the National Trust over three decades had made him personally and professionally familiar with most of the great houses of England ...”

“... off-putting model. One readily sees why scrupulous users of English would want to shy from it, as James Greene also does in his translations from Afanasy Fet, which Henry Gifford introduces with a monitory subtext of disengagement: ‘Russian poetry even today keeps the formality of structure, the regular positioning of ...”