“... After the death of Henry James’s father in 1882, his sister-in-law Catharine Walsh, better known as Aunt Kate, burned a large quantity of the family papers, including many letters between Henry James senior and his wife. Henry James himself in later life made a number of bonfires in which he destroyed a great quantity of the letters he had received ...”

“... Seven Republicans supported the president. Johnson remained in office until 1869, when Ulysses S. Grant moved into the White House after winning the Republican nomination during Johnson’s impeachment trial and then the election in November 1868. In a somewhat surreal postscript to his presidency, Johnson reappeared in Washington in 1875 as a senator from ...”

“... he had thought of including in North by Northwest (1959), but didn’t. Roger O. Thornhill (Cary Grant) is on his way from New York to Chicago. Why not have him stop off at Detroit, then still in its Motor City heyday? I wanted to have a long dialogue scene between Cary Grant and one of the factory workers as they walk ...”

“... at Southern Georgia University in 1993, is a celebration of the stylistic elaborations in Henry James’s travel writings, literary criticism and autobiographical works, most of which belong to his later or, as it is often called, major phase that includes, more famously, The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl. Tanner takes evident ...”

“... echelons of the fashionable Geological Society. They also enabled him to negotiate a government grant to publish the Zoology of the Beagle voyage. A retrenching Whig ministry was persuaded to put up £1000, allowing the young Darwin to dispense his own patronage. He parcelled out his Beagle specimens to white-collar naturalists: to zoological craftsmen like ...”

“... be a second-rate motor salesman, or a yellow-press journalist, pickled in alcohol and nicotine,’ James Bond tells himself about halfway through From Russia with Love, the fifth and perhaps the best of Ian Fleming’s thrillers. This sounds like good advice, but it does raise one large issue: what exactly counts as being ‘pickled’? Flying from London to ...”

“... more than a constructed and grammatical ‘Subject’ – a thing which Foucault was not ready to grant. He had arrived on the philosophical scene at the ‘structuralist’ moment, marked by a decisive shift to the doctrine of the primacy of language, according to which the ‘self’ or ‘subject’ is the invention, not the originator, of language. It was ...”

“... was that Prince Albert had provided the definitive and approved working model. Robert Rhodes James has written an entertaining and effective but oddly out-of-kilter book about that model. His standard texts appear to be Justin McCarthy and H.A.L. Fisher, historians whose reputations had faded when Mr James was a ...”

“... immunity’. On 15 March, under growing pressure as other European states banned mass gatherings, Grant Shapps, the transport secretary, decried ‘populist’ measures that ‘don’t have the right impact’, contrasting Italian and British policy, and claiming that Britain was the only country ‘following the science’.Matt Hancock, the health ...”

“... dubious values – abroad, so usefully that until recently it was funded by a Foreign Office grant-in-aid. It also performs a feat of domestic diplomacy, presenting the nation to itself, often shorn of its uglier aspects.It’s clear enough that the ‘nation’ is currently divided, and this should mean, according to the corporation’s own axiom, that ...”

“... show that the figure and the Don Carlos legend illustrate our broader fascination with trying to grant life to inanimate matter: ‘The monk models in votive intercession or sympathetic repair everything the physicians were trying to accomplish: to prevent the ebbing of life from the body, to rewind its vital spring, to put the prince back on his feet so ...”

“... in 1956 but is only now receiving her first retrospective, at Charleston, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant’s house in Sussex (until 30 August). The drawings and paintings selected were created between 1908 and 1928, Hamnett’s most prolific years, and are on show alongside two large portraits of her by Roger Fry and a bronze sculpture by Henri ...”

“... international war crimes tribunals, like the growing question-mark over the ability of regimes to grant themselves or their nastier predecessors amnesties, marks a strong move to qualify national sovereignty in the interests of humanitarian standards; a move tellingly resisted in regard to its own citizens by the United States, whose long-arm jurisdiction is ...”

“... its learning lightly, or so one might think. For reasons never completely explained, either in James Shulman’s graceful introduction or in Merton’s gallant afterword, written at 91 after four operations for cancer and with a fifth impending, the manuscript was shelved at Merton’s behest (he mentions Barber’s gracious indulgence on this score) and ...”

“... any individual could singlehandedly precipitate a major shift in human thought. Adrian Desmond and James Moore place Darwin above Marx and Freud. It is hard to think of successors to that trinity of lone rangers in an age when research is financed by foundations and carried on by teams and generally mounted on the kind of scale where the capacity of execution ...”