“... she found the time and place to do so – like Emily Dickinson in collaboration with Henry James.    Fingerbone was never an impressive town. It was chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather, and chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere ...   Sylvie did tell me once that Lucille ...”

“... At any rate that is the impression one gets from dipping into the Journal (1835-44) of Barclay Fox, which reveals exactly the kind of self-confident, debonair, but caring personality that Bence-Jones and Montgomery-Massingberd would like their British aristocrat to have. They ascribe to him a belief in hard work and merit: surely he owes that to an ...”

“... the names of explorers, famous in their day, but now known only to Arctic buffs, such as John and James Clark Ross, Rae, Pullen, Collinson, M’Clure, Austin, Ommanney, Richardson, Penny, DeHaven, Kane, Forsyth, Bellot, Kennedy, Belcher, Inglefield, M’Clintock – and names of ships, such as ...”

“... at home, even if we have to wait for renewed acquaintance with Wonder Woman, the Black Widow and James Bond. Among the best of the recent releases is Arkansas (US only so far), directed by Clark Duke, perhaps best known for playing Clark Green in the American version of The Office. He has directed films before, but only short ones.The film opens well, but ...”

“... artist, at once folk, Conceptual and Pop, an unlikely son of Edward Hopper, Marcel Duchamp and James Dean. Two retrospectives – a small show of photographs, a large one of drawings – are at the Whitney Museum until 26 September (the drawings will travel to Washington and LA over the next year); a collection of notes and interviews, Leave Any ...”

“... of the marriage was raised in Parliament, the Prince of Wales denied it even to his friend Fox who, believing him, stood up in the Commons and denied it too. Not surprisingly Mrs Fitzherbert was very cross and though she forgave the Prince she never forgave Fox who, in turn, found it hard to forgive the Prince. All ...”

“... This is a collection of essays, old and new, by diverse hands, brought together by James T. Como, a Professor of Rhetorical Communication in the City University of New York. He tells us in an introduction: ‘Now several societies exist for the purpose of studying Lewis’s thoughts; film rights to several of his books have been purchased, and filmed documentaries of his life have been produced; both popular and scholarly books on Lewis are being published with increasing frequency (so that the Modern Language Association cites Lewis as one of the most rapidly increasing objects of literary study in the world ...”

“... a vomiting teenage contortionist: it also includes Protestant accounts of deliverance, mischievous fox spirits from China and Japan, and a fascinating semi-improvised exorcism performed by a Vodou priestess (Vodou treats possession as a predictable and often positive spiritual phenomenon). The Christian tradition predominates, but Laycock doesn’t include the ...”

“... Moore and her mother finished her in Brooklyn (decorum studies?) after she left Vassar. James Laughlin, founder of New Directions, publisher and friend of Ezra Pound, was so desperate to publish her that even after he accepted he wasn’t going to be allowed to, he still hoped at least to be permitted to announce that he was. The alpha males – and ...”

“... Although Jack Holmes and His Friend isn’t a ‘research novel’, it does include an elaborate fox-hunting scene. (A friend is thanked in the acknowledgments for correcting fox-related errors.) White clearly finds beauty in class markers, but since he never gives them symbolic weight, they serve, as they did for Emma ...”

“... as absurd as the old knight – that if Becker is an ‘old wolf’ then Lawrence is a young fox. The passage is comic because of the overstatement, as if ‘naked liberty’ could possibly be an adequate opposition to ‘security and bank-balance and power’. Stylistically, the passage is comic because it is built on contradictions: the two hate each ...”

“... that Cage has noticed something of interest in a great literary text. The revelation is that James Joyce used the ten letters of his name, in their own order, as a concealed motif throughout the composition of his book. A literary scholar might simply have noticed the ploy, identified a few instances, made some appropriate comment and passed on: but ...”

“... was always a confounding issue. As early as 1971, experienced anthropologists such as Robert Fox and Zeus Salazar had observed that since the group’s nearest neighbours were barely two and a half miles away it was only reasonable to suppose they must have been having regular outside contact. Others seemed to have a vested interest in proving the ...”

“... Early on in his new novel, James Buchan employs an image of which he is evidently fond: that of two mirrors placed face to face, and the unique and disconcerting effect which they produce, of reflections endlessly reflected in reflections. The same mirrors turned up in Frozen Desire, Buchan’s autobiographical meditation on the meaning of money, where they served as a symbol of financial investment and the silent accumulation of compound interest ...”

“... Herbert are set in Britain, The Beauties and the Furies and House of All Nations in Paris, Letty Fox: Her Luck, The People with the Dogs, and A Little Tea, a Little Chat in New York, I’m Dying Laughing in Hollywood, The Little Hotel in Switzerland.Seven Poor Men of Sydney is set entirely in Australia, and For Love Alone begins there; but the novel about ...”