“... new Lurie doesn’t resemble a Bradbury or Lodge, or for that matter an early Lurie, so much as William Boyd’s Stars and Bars, which also investigates how members of one Anglophone culture don’t merely observe but exploit the other one. The protagonists in the new Lurie and Boyd novels are diffident people in mid-life, misfits or at least ...”

“... narrow: ‘the way in which the Mathematical Tripos at Cambridge shaped the physics of men such as William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) and James Clerk Maxwell’. Of course, nobody believes that even Cambridge in the early years of the last century was so inward-looking that the Tripos and Smith’s Prize examinations were ...”

“... some of them.’ The subsequent film made Villa a movie star – which Walsh was later to do for James Cagney. Instead, Fuentes takes Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?) as his quixotic American hero. Bierce was born obscurely, of farming stock in Ohio. Virtually nothing is known of his origins. He served in the Civil War in the Indiana infantry with reckless ...”

“... Hugh Ouston produces work on the institutional changes brought about during and immediately after James VII’s forced cool-off in Scotland in the early 1680s; others of the essays show a willingness to investigate aspects of Scottish society, both civil and ecclesiastical, before the Enlightenment. These voices have mostly not been heard before, and the book ...”

“... under Moses.’ It was as a preacher of ‘free grace’ that Clarkson first made his mark. James Nayler, who is sometimes taken as the leader of a ‘Ranting’ tendency in early Quakerism, was equally known as a defender of ‘the universal free grace of God to all mankind’. Davis passes by, with one glancing reference, Christopher Hill’s ...”

“... the end not only of Haydon’s career, but of painting in ‘the tradition of Joshua Reynolds, James Barry and Benjamin West’. How convincing this argument is depends on how we view that ‘tradition’. Of the three artists only West, who found a royal patron with the necessary deep pockets and high ceilings, made a career as a history painter. Reynolds ...”

“... the author follows the glow in the dark across the work of several novelists – Remarque, Mailer, William Styron, Hemingway – confirms this. ‘I have noted all the cigarettes that are crushed out, thrown away or unlit at night, shared and hoarded, detested and loved – instruments of torture and surgery, tokens of friendship and signs of love – in ...”

“... of making ‘daily life itself a dignity and a sufficiency’ was to some extent prefigured by William Carlos Williams’s Paterson, which, like The Maximus Poems, explores the historical layers and quotidian rituals of an average American town. Olson differs from Williams, however, in his emphasis on his own participation in the life of Gloucester. The ...”

“... tendency to think in terms of dramatic absolutes. A crude version of this argument can be found in William Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, a relentless piece of Nazi pedigree-hunting with some claim to be considered, despite strong competition, the worst book ever written on German history. Others have argued more subtly for the role played by ...”

“... its correspondence columns: this time with its refusal to print Wynne Godley’s refutation of William Rees-Mogg’s claim that the British economy has outperformed the Japanese by 75 per cent over the last decade.) The Book War with the Times was a great test for the NBA and clinching proof that, this time, the agreement would hold. The publishers won ...”

“... woman he loved. Her ideas of their relationship counted for nothing against his will. Both Henry James and Choderlos de Laclos would have deeply admired the skill with which Lawrence exploited his apparent powerlessness in the face of three amoral but powerful and realistic women – Frau von Richthofen and her two daughters – scheming to give him his ...”

“... into world dominators. Vital steps to its development included the technical breakthrough of William Levett, the rector of Buxted, and the Sussex ironmaster Ralph Hogge, who in the early 1540s worked out how to make guns out of cast-iron (not welded iron or cast-bronze) which did not blow up and were a quarter of the price of gunmetal guns. Because of ...”

“... in the US and abroad; American Dreamers (2011), about the 20th-century left; and a biography of William Jennings Bryan, published in 2006, which attempted to rescue its protagonist from what E.P. Thompson in a different context called ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’. (Condescension regarding Bryan emanates from secular urban liberals who know ...”

“... begin a letter to a woman with an Italian name ‘Dear Dago’, while the state’s other senator, James Eastland, would not only glare at New York’s Jewish senator, Jacob Javits, and say things like ‘I don’t like you or your kind’ but actually proposed that Congress limit the number of Jews conducting interstate businesses because ten thousand Jewish ...”

“... this is precisely the reason they cannot be pineapples. The most they can do is create what Henry James called the ‘air of reality’ of pineapples. In this sense, all realist art is a kind of con trick – a fact that is most obvious when the artist includes details that are redundant to the narrative (the precise tint and curve of a moustache, let us ...”