“... they knock 5p off the price of the Times. The NBA is buried, though not necessarily dead. It has risen from the grave before and will probably do so again. But as in the late 19th century, it may take some uncomfortable decades before the book trade rediscovers the virtues of self-restraint and the internal strength to reimpose it. What follows in the short ...”

“... It was​ in the mid-1980s that the short seller James Chanos first realised he was being investigated. People were ‘going through my garbage’, he says. They didn’t find anything incriminating: Chanos lives a ‘nice quiet yuppie existence’, said one of the private investigators, whose report ended up in the hands of the Wall Street Journal ...”

“... to be as acute a Christian dramatist as any Italian. The negative space between Holbein’s risen Jesus and his Magdalen is as agonising as that in the National Gallery’s better-known canvas on the same theme by Titian. Titian​ is effectively the backbone of Caroline art history, to the extent, that is, that any theme can be said to have informed ...”

“... and ships raised by the government of India occupied the Persian port of Bushehr at great expense. James Outram, who lends his name to many neighbourhoods in India, led the British forces. He returned to India to quell the uprising known as the Indian Mutiny – or, depending on your choice of historian, the First Indian War of Independence. As Indian rebels ...”

“... campaigns in Gaul. When or in what precise capacity he went there is unclear, but he had risen to be one of Caesar’s legates when we meet him at the double siege of Alesia, the climactic battle that put an end to the uprising of the conquered Gauls under Vercingetorix. By that point, in 52 BC, Antony was thirty years old and so eligible to stand ...”

“... Reed. The Beats were now heritage fodder, a potential Bloomsbury group. There was even talk of James Ivory optioning a Neal Cassady property. I wondered, thinking of Blake’s formative experiences there, whether Carolyn had caught any of Alan Bennett’s Westminster Abbey footage? Bennett, required to audition for the John Betjeman slot, couldn’t bring ...”

“... relatively standard cases of the urge to ‘be a man’. Leave it to the genteel types – William James being another and later example – to mistake manhood for the capacity to endure pre-arranged physical hardship. Their version, no doubt, of the English public school. It will be obvious that Leverenz likes to stay close to home – as with ...”

“... accommodation, hotels, bed and breakfasts, and hostels. By the end of 2023, that number had risen to 112,660 English households, including 145,800 children, the worst figures since modern homelessness law came into effect in the 20th century. In reality, the number is much higher. It’s not easy to be recognised as statutorily homeless, even if you ...”

“... against his nature, been disciplined to coolness. The terms in which he praises a fellow scholar (James Woolley) have to take the risk of seeming to wish to be transferred home, as indeed would be deserved: ‘The whole essay is a model of rigorous but imaginative scholarship.’ It has been easy for people to be snide about Ehrenpreis’s having taken more ...”

“... after service, pull on his thumbs and brag about National Socialism.’ Wodehouse revised by James Lees-Milne. Fear of the mob; order and chaos. As with the world so with fiction: elephantine narratives, multiple versions running away from each other, stories begetting stories. How to keep it under control? ‘I’m talking about, I don’t know, about ...”

“... lunch in a London restaurant. Agnes Magruder was a grand Bostonian, ‘a character from a Henry James novel’ according to her daughter. She was known as ‘Magouche’, the name given her by the painter Arshile Gorky, with whom she had a turbulent marriage until his suicide in 1948. Joan Leigh Fermor, a former secretary to Osbert Lancaster, was the wife ...”

“... she wanted to play the game in 1849 on a visit to Mansfield to meet the family of her new fiancé, James Collinson. By now, at the age of nineteen, her poems had been accepted in the national press, and after the despair that her father’s illness had cast on the whole household, she was enjoying again the audacious conversation and artistic ambition of the ...”

“... scene and returns in her mind ‘to the wells and springs of childhood’, as the New Zealand poet James Baxter put it, that her writing opens up. Mansfield herself was clear about the distinction. Her notebooks and reviews return again and again to the split between fiction as art and as ‘entertainment’, the glory of the perhaps failed attempt as against ...”

“... you don’t install mirrored wardrobes.’ Later on there’s a two-page spread of the young actor James Franco’s lips. That’s Gentleman’s Quarterly for you: a magazine for men who want to have what women have – clean nails, hairless chests, fresh armpits and moist lips. A magazine for men clever enough to want to look like the kind of person they’re ...”

“... several of which remain indispensable – Schlesinger was among the chief assemblers of the King James Version of American liberalism. His Cold War manual, The Vital Center, is one of the period’s shrewdest pieces of liberal propaganda. He effectively made the aspirationless politics of the 1950s look like a tough-minded creed that could sustain the ...”