“... and old experienced Europe. In 1919 Russell traced the pragmatism that Dewey shared with William James to ‘that instinctive belief in the omnipotence of Man and the creative power of his beliefs which is perhaps natural in a young, growing and prosperous country, where men’s problems have been simpler than in Europe and usually soluble by energy ...”

“... maintenance or alterations. ‘Every time we want to change a light bulb, it costs £25,’ Colin Harris, the deputy head, told me. Ellington and Hereson has been trying to break away from Kent’s traditional selective education system – the county retains the 11-plus – by becoming an academy, which would result in its being funded directly from central ...”

“... the Caribbean, but he soon learns to his bitter disappointment that in Britain he is simply Black. Harris goes around in a three-piece suit and bowler hat, with a copy of the Times rolled under his arm, but his respectable demeanour is sabotaged when Five Past Twelve smokes weed at a party and the smell lingers on Harris’s ...”

“... British readers like myself – the majority, I suspect – for whom Peru is an unknown country. James Michener could brief us in a heavy-handed tutorial prelude on South American politics. But Shakespeare has chosen an artful form of narrative that cannot carry any great burden of exposition. I wish that Collins had appended ‘In Pursuit of Guzman’ to ...”

“... was the scene of a ‘strange and recurring tragedy’ which provided the point of departure for James Frazer’s anthropological classic, The Golden Bough. The grove was guarded by a wary figure, a priest and a murderer, ever on his guard against an assailant who would try to murder him in order to take his place: ‘Such was the rule of the sanctuary. A ...”

“... worse. In their desperation the cops had in December consulted a New York psychiatrist called James Brussel, described by John Douglas as ‘the father of behavioural profiling’. Douglas is the FBI man who inspired Thomas Harris to invent the character Jack Crawford in the Hannibal Lecter novels, so he should ...”

“... an understatement. It was on the day of Oscar Hornung’s birth, 24 March 1895, that Frank Harris met Wilde at the Café Royal and advised him to drop his libel suit against Lord Queensberry. Ten days later, the disastrous libel suit opened at the Old Bailey, and only three weeks after that, Wilde was himself in the dock. Would you really want to ...”

“... as John Quincy Adams described it in 1823. In imitation of British freelance imperialists such as James Brooke, the ‘white rajah’ who ruled the state of Sarawak on Borneo as a private fiefdom in the mid-19th century, America produced its own brand of freebooters, including William Walker, the Tennessee doctor who conquered and ruled Nicaragua for ten ...”

“... who constitute a priesthood: ‘the death-of-language writers are self-ordained priests’ (James Stalker, in Greenbaum). John Silverlight, in his excerpted columns about usage and abusage that constitute Words, is prompt to make clear that he is playing down, not laying down, the law: ‘What I am not, to the disappointment of some colleagues, is a ...”

“... the full voie lactée, with a final push to Finisterre. (He wanted to step beyond the legend of St James, slayer of Moors, back to the earlier Roman track to the end of the western lands.) There was no discussion around the great Euro debate, the marchers were too busy arguing over different accounts of Edith Swan-Neck and scratching at their tablets and ...”

“... of the fresh-painted lanes at the base of the Bow Flyover, leading to Stratford, to Daniel Harris, crushed by a bus filled with Olympic correspondents being shuttled between venues. The towpath alongside Regent’s Canal has for some time been dominated by a peloton of hard-peddling commuters. Now the strip of pavement at the approach to Haggerston ...”

“... in ‘went about my ways’. This is what one does despite the endless wondering. So when Frank Harris says, in one of the many brilliant interludes in The Invention of Love, ‘I think he stayed with the wrong people in Shropshire. I never read such a book for telling you you’re better off dead,’ he is right, but he’s missing, as Stoppard never ...”

“... model of a minotaur through to the ‘bad’ and faux-naif portraiture of Martin Maloney and James Rielly. Other painters adapt traditional Realist or Modernist styles to new subjects or, like Jenny Saville, introduce new stylistic mannerisms – extreme foreshortening and superimposed calligraphy. In fact, there is a rich range of strategies for ...”

“... has in BSkyB, a stake which proved sufficient to have Murdoch’s 30-year-old college dropout son, James, appointed chief executive of the company, in the face of opposition from other shareholders. When I say News Corp is ‘his company’, I mean it’s a company of which he owns about 35 per cent, the exact amount varying from time to time as his ...”

“... hunched over a legal pad, sweating lightly, pressing Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (Jared Harris) to admit that a sentence about a character paring his fingernails was inspired by James Joyce. Admit it he does not: ‘The phrase you quote is an unpleasant coincidence.’ Cumberbatch’s sweating intensifies. His ...”