“... it? … As sure as you breathe & that he was the first of beings the Seal belonged to him – Oh Lord!’ The sceptic might answer that it could have belonged to someone else with the same initials – the Stratford draper William Smith, for instance – but the possibility remains strong that it was Shakespeare’s. It is certainly a genuine ring of the ...”

“... was in a hospital ward when I saw the photos he was posting on Facebook: ‘Welcome to my new home,’ he joked. It seemed fitting that my Facebook feed was filling up with posts from a mental institution. As the conflict over Ukraine intensified my social media feeds became more and more unsettling. Acquaintances from Moscow, the ‘creatives’ who make ...”

“... Lindisfarne, Cuthbert’s monks were carrying his body from place to place in search of a new home. Provisions had already run low when they discovered that their last cheese had been stolen from its hiding place. Taking counsel, they did the obvious thing and asked their saint to turn the thief into a fox. At once a vixen appeared with a cheese in its ...”

“... other type has Kipling, Ian Hay and P.G. Wodehouse), and in the average well-to-do home’. Initial reviews of Personal Pleasures – ‘most amusing’, ‘delightful’, ‘an ideal bedside book’ – were along these lines, calculated to please a publisher but suggesting something altogether slighter than the reality. In her introduction ...”

“... that prefers light and agile to massive and lumbering, but it may not be insignificant that his home state, Arizona, is one of the few where Lockheed has recently shed jobs rather than piled them on. (What Arizona has instead of multiple Lockheed facilities is the 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, aka the ...”

“... example of product placement. She started to write fiction in Mecklenburgh Square and made it the home of her heroine in Gaudy Night. On the first page, Harriet Vane looks out at the square’s tulips and tennis players, while thinking of Oxford. She does so, Wade points out, from a room which her suitor, Peter Wimsey, never enters: this is the domain of an ...”

“... a young peasant couple are due to be married, the wedding is cancelled because a local Spanish lord has decided he wants the woman for himself. The years from 1628 to 1630 offered a dramatic backdrop: famine, military invasion and a devastating outbreak of the plague. ‘The material is rich,’ Manzoni wrote to the French historian Claude ...”

“... in 1651, and also ‘buy for us 15 or 20 young lusty negers of about 15 years of age, bring them home with you to London.’ Among the aristocracy and gentry, it had become fashionable to be waited on by dark-skinned boys and girls. A year after he admired Mingo’s dancing, Pepys noted in passing that his patron, ...”

“... of voyaging long distances the better to fret about some spoiled darling left behind in the Home Counties’. But his most furious barbs are reserved for Norman Podhoretz, the reactionary editor of Commentary. Hitchens seems almost obsessed by him, returning to the attack over and over again. It is a curious fact that Podhoretz, an immodest man who has ...”

“... Ancien Régime deserved the devoted service that men like him had given it. His Letter to a Noble Lord, written in 1797 after the death of his only son, gives vent to a deep bitterness at the contrast between his concern for the welfare of aristocratic England and aristocratic flirtation with revolutionary ideas that would bring down the whole edifice. The ...”

“... no Calverley, alas), he has one very heartening story which may be true even though it has Lord Dacre for its authority. After the suicide of the anti-smoking fanatic Adolf Hitler, it seems, all the bunker deputies began to light up: ‘now the headmaster had gone and the boys could break the rules. Under the soothing influence of nicotine’, they ...”

“... introduced to the capital by Mateo, his worldly uncle, and by Daniel, a young dandy who plays the Lord Henry Wotton to Gabriel’s Dorian Gray. ‘Daniel will be good for the boy – or bad for him, it comes to the same thing,’ according to Mateo. The art that Mateo admires consists of ‘small but daring experiments within an exhausted ...”

“... to her sofa at 25. He had asthma and she had migraine – and they very soon ceased to have sex. Home life was irregular and inequitable. Her elder sister was first dumped with and later adopted by prosperous maternal relations who pampered her. ‘Fryn’ (a self-made contraction of ‘Wynifried’ which seems to have been quite typical of her ...”

“... behavior and the uselessness and regressiveness of her specialism has not gone unnoticed back home. At the airport before takeoff, she opened the Atlantic to find herself and her research singled out as particularly pointless by a New York intellectual called L.D. Zimmern. Zimmern is someone Lurie-readers have met previously: briefly a member of the ...”

“... tale not the teller? But, more important, the ‘subtle unsoundness’ which Marlow detected in Lord Jim is not only a part of Conrad himself but an essential part of the way literature and duality work together. Never mind about the ship at the end, and the way the captain, to do service to his double, risks his first command: what matters to Conrad and to ...”