“... chaotic phenomenon is a poor model for the kinds of strategic intervention she advocates. Edward Lorenz, the originator of the butterfly trope, wasn’t asking us to imagine a remarkably clever insect calculating exactly how and when to flap its wings in such a way as to produce a storm in, say, Ipswich. The butterfly neither controls nor knows the ...”

“... hands are always the same. The second comes during ‘Molasses to Rum’, chillingly delivered by Edward Rutledge, the delegate from South Carolina who will not vote for independence until an anti-slavery clause is removed from the declaration. He leaps up on a table and becomes the auctioneer, the room goes red like something laid open, and this is the ...”

“... One of his teachers, trying to explain what Wordsworth meant when he spoke of ‘trances’, is said to have referred him to Ramakrishna, a yogi at a nearby temple. In fact, curiosity about Ramakrishna was already widespread by the time of their first encounter in 1881. Even if the story is untrue, it captures Ramakrishna’s allure as a romantic rebel. A ...”

“... until at least the tenth century. The victory of Imam Asim over the local Buddhist regime is said to have taken place in the 12th century, but the distinctive forms of Islamic governance in the region can be dated to the arrival of Sufis of the Naqshbandi order in the late 14th or early 15th century. A combined system of temporal and spiritual power ...”

“... doubled and thousands of new staff had been hired. Many of the revelations in the papers leaked by Edward Snowden (which Kerbaj refers to as ‘stolen documents’) had to do with systems brought in for the new era of mass surveillance. The general scope of the established programmes had already been revealed by the brilliant work of the investigative ...”

“... emerging Cold War foreign policy. In 1952, during their courtship, she gave King a copy of Edward Bellamy’s influential socialist novel Looking Backward (1888). She was a talented singer and attended the New England Conservatory in Boston. (Ironically, in accordance with the Supreme Court’s ‘separate but equal’ doctrine, the government of ...”

“... of prose especially? I heard a woman on the radio discussing The Wild Places and she actually said: ‘Oh, he’s so brave, I couldn’t possibly do that.’ What’s being reduced is not the health and variety of the landscape, but the variety of our engagement, our way of seeing, our languages. There are lots of people, many of them women, who live ...”

“... castration"’. Brandt himself, talking about the same picture in a film made by the BBC in 1983, said only that ‘it was the camera that produced this effect. The lens distorted everything. I never knew it would happen.’ In the context of the elaborate analysis by his critics, this answer sounds like a rebuke.The BBC film is shown on a loop as part of the ...”

“... to not sounding like he used to. John Bayley, an attentive but sceptical admirer, once shrewdly said of the early Hill manner: ‘The danger with this sort of poetry is that it is the kind that looks like poetry, which need not mean that it is not the real thing, but is bound to raise a certain sort of doubt’; and you could see the progressive roughening ...”

“... but quickly building up to such fundamental criticisms of the book that the demoralised author said he would withdraw it altogether; at which James protested and pleaded, successfully though not with any retraction of the criticisms he had made. Belchamber duly came out, in 1904, and was not well received – though perhaps for reasons other than those put ...”

“... art or to artists. He certainly regarded himself as an artist, and his own art was fiction, but he said firmly, in a broadcast of 1944, that ‘the novel . . . has not any rules and so there is no such thing as the art of fiction.’ This remark probably arose from his habitual disrespect for, or worry about, Henry James. The Ambassadors is given more ...”

“... Crachami’s life story is on the left-hand page, the giant’s on the right. Both are said to be adapted from the display panel at the Hunterian Museum. It is difficult to know whether the glass and the dust, beautiful and haunting though they are, would work without the stories in the book. They are made to work together, but the point of the ...”

“... and training. Since 1913, Jones had been the sole president of the British Society, and Edward Glover, an abrasive and unpopular man, loomed as his heir. If the main plot of this epic personal and intellectual struggle is the collision between Klein and Anna Freud, its leading subplot is the downfall of Glover. This was the outcome of a bitter ...”

“... comedy of ‘The Secret Sharer’. Conrad, who used on occasion to vie with his friend and agent Edward Garnett in yarn-spinning, told him that his tale ‘between you and me, is it ... every word fits and there’s not a single uncertain note. Luck my boy. Pure luck.’ The sense of fitness was what most impressed D.H. Lawrence, who observed of one of the ...”

“... need for passionate authorial control, of constant adverbial direction as to how sentences were said and heard. The dramatist loses so much control that he may have been glad to get back from the stage to the novelistic page, which will (apparently) accept authority. Horne also does not consider how the reputations of some of the elder novelists after their ...”