“... Victorian novelist. As for the sartorial descriptions in Surtees, they resemble nothing so much as James Joyce when the latter is indulging his appetite for specificity about garments and their constituents to the hilt – as in the Circe episode of Ulysses. There are so many of these passages in Surtees that it is hard to select one for quotation, and the ...”

“... of long, narrative colonial histories stretching back to Elphinstone, Malcolm, Grant Duff and James Mill, and is a monument more to his career as an Old India Hand than as a historian. His aim being to rescue the architects of British rule from ‘the oblivion into which they have fallen’, he concentrates on ‘the deeds, motives and thoughts of the ...”

“... a novelist called Paul Auster), is reducible to the paranoid pairings of observer and observed, hunter and quarry. The ‘reality’ of New York and its people might be gauged by inspecting its census returns: these are frequently fictitious, or so Auster tells us, and the job of compiling them offers a useful apprenticeship for a would-be novelist. Another ...”

“... historians of radicalism going round in ever-decreasing circles of self-absorption. Like the snark hunter, they should watch out in case they ...”

“... could not speak a word of their language. He learned quickly, however, and soon became an expert hunter, but he remained trapped between the two cultures. In 1916, he returned to New York, hoping to parlay his earlier celebrity into a career, only to discover that there was more interest in the war in Europe than in polar exploration. He left the ...”

“... Into the Heart of Borneo contains much pretty tiresome knockabout between the reverenced James Fenton, whose every quip is sacredly recorded, and the bumbling O’Hanlon. The precise descriptions of birds are far more entertaining. For this next trip O’Hanlon again approached James Fenton but received from the ...”

“... on by Hamlet in staging the play that catches the conscience of King Claudius. George Buchanan, James I’s tutor, saw the depiction of tyranny in his own tragedies as an instrument of James’s education. The blunt couplets of The Mirror for Magistrates supplied vivid warnings of the destruction that awaits kings and ...”

“... The vessel was the bark Endeavour; the commander was the bluff, 39-year-old Yorkshireman James Cook, who was also an able astronomer. No one had thought to add natural history to the workload, but Banks got wind of the plan and thrust himself forward. He secured his place on the Endeavour by pulling strings – Lord Sandwich, a former first lord of ...”

“... an open question. In their book, George III and the Mad Business (1969), Ida Macalpine and Richard Hunter argue convincingly for this retrospective diagnosis on the strength of the purple tinge the King’s urine took on while he was ill. Less convincingly, they traced the supposed incidence of the disease in other royals, nipping up and down George Ill’s ...”

“... dichotomy between the ‘rational’ and the ‘irrational’ (now brilliantly dissected by Susan James in The Content of Social Explanation). The other device for preserving the integrity of an alien culture is descriptive. Whatever interpretation is given to it, the sheer fact that certain people in 18th-century France found killing cats on such a scale ...”

“... flashy reversing, zooming and stopping as the rear cars begin to turn round. In the course of this James R. goes over to one of the cars and asks them if they are looking for the man with a hammer, whereupon a policeman leaps from the car, and ignoring the open gate, vaults theatrically over the garden wall, shouting, ‘Here, we want you!’ and the young man ...”

“... such house, which happened to be near Oxford, was rented by Maurice Hastings, a man described by James Lees-Milne as ‘a capricious alcoholic ... rich, clever and slightly mad’. Hastings would lash his landlord’s family portraits, which were by Kneller, with a hunting crop, and fire his rifle at the private parts of the garden statues. Lees-Milne was so ...”

“... of letters of intimacy of any nature, except for some love-notes to the rather alarmed Brian James, the Australian actor White fell for in 1963. There are no letters to his mother Ruth and none to Manoly, who faithfully burnt them. There are early letters to lovers and ex-lovers, but so many doors are closed to us that our view of the novelist is only ...”

“... It is the book which sowed the seed for John Buchan’s Richard Hannay, for Indiana Jones and James Bond, and though less slick than its successors, its anxieties and lunacies are more interesting. It isn’t suitable for children; perhaps not suitable at all.As a child Henry Rider Haggard was believed to be stupid: his father told him he was destined to ...”

“... Report of 1955 is cited for its ‘chilling’ prose. President Eisenhower had commissioned James Doolittle to evaluate CIA operations. His Report, as the Church Commission notes, can be read as a brief for future CIA operations. It is now clear that we are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination by whatever means and at ...”