“... than close friends. Holroyd gives a fine account of his relationship with the amiable Ibsenite William Archer. Shaw, working as an art critic, would go with Archer to the shows. ‘He didn’t know much about painting then,’ said Archer, ‘but he thought he did, and that was the main point.’ It was the same, perhaps, with women He devoted some of his ...”

“... predecessor is lost – the first ever detective story or civilised thriller. The drama critic James Agate, who once savagely described Donald Wolfit’s Hamlet as a private detective watching the jewels at the Claudius-Gertrude wedding feast, may have said more than he knew. Yet to praise Hamlet as the first detective story makes sense mainly in terms of ...”

“... accepted as genuine by Robert Sherard, Wilde’s first biographer; some of them are now in the William Andrews Clark Library in Los Angeles. A book collector named Herbert Boyce Satcher met Hope in New York in 1919; he described him as ‘a strange sort of vagrant poet’, who wrote refined verses ‘completely at variance with his character’. His ...”

“... amatory adventures in stuffy aristocratic households. Like and unlike a foreshadowing of Henry James’s The Awkward Age, ‘Lady Susan’ perhaps startles most by the fact that it doesn’t seem, with all its marvellous originality, quite to come off; it leaves a reader cold. And it does so, because the story is cold. Where Henry ...”

“... Sofia Andrukhovych, Neal Ascherson, Ilya Budraitskis, James Butler, Andrew Cockburn, Meehan Crist, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Peter Geoghegan, Jeremy Harding, Owen Hatherley, Abby Innes, Mimi Jiang, Thomas Jones, Laleh Khalili, Jackson Lears, Donald MacKenzie, Thomas Meaney, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Azadeh Moaveni, Jan-Werner Müller, Vadim Nikitin, Jacqueline Rose, Jeremy Smith, Daniel Soar, Olena Stiazhkina, Vera Tolz, Daniel Trilling Sofia Andrukhovychtranslated by Uilleam BlackerOn​  the first day, we hid in the Mins’ka metro station with our dog, Zlata ...”

“... Yet he was also the natural outsider in a scene that as well as Britten (born 1913), included William Walton (1902) and Lennox Berkeley (1903), with the reassuring presence of Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872) hovering over them all. Whether Tippett ever entered the pantheon, or even deserves to, remains an open question for some. His Concerto for Double ...”

“... Rex Ingram’s The Magician (1926), drawn from a Maugham novel, mysteriously incorporated into the James Whale Frankenstein and subsequently acquiring the generic name of Igor – by his grudging response to one of the few occasions when a disability materialises as an aspect of the hero. Howard Breslin’s short story ‘Bad Day at Honda’ has an explicitly ...”

“... Road had previously been occupied by an American draft-decliner and notorious non-inhaler, William Jefferson Clinton. It’s tempting to compare the parallel careers of these two men, both conservative liberals, advocates of small freedoms. Men of the Sixties. Charismatic hustlers with an eye for a deal. Provincials trading on cracker-barrel ...”

“... particularly nowadays, with so many slots on cheapo channels needing to be filled (witness James Corden and Matthew Horne of Gavin and Stacey fame, currently advertising Lesbian Vampire Killers on the bus shelters of Britain). Meyer, however, has a different answer. She says that Twilight came to her in ‘a very vivid dream’ on the night of 1 June ...”

“... The contributors fall into three main groups: the poet-critics (Blake Morrison, Craig Raine, James Fenton, Alan Jenkins, Clive Wilmer), the academics (Nicholas Jenkins, Terry Castle, Colin McGinn, Deborah Cameron, Deborah Bowman, William Pritchard, Eric Homberger, Michael O’Neill, Rachel Buxton) and the memoirists ...”

“... The allusion may even be a kind of apology for surviving into so great a success. By 1603, when James came to the throne, Shakespeare could have retired rich and honoured to his great house in Stratford. The work he had amassed around the turn of the century was formidably diverse and brilliant. History had grown in his hands from chaotic chronicle to the ...”

“... Sedition Act of 1798, which prohibited citizens from criticising the government, his son James Lyon reprinted the biography, omitting the bits about the Deists and Socinians to let the prophet’s life story stand as a critique of the abuse of power and the suppression of dissent – with Adams as the latest in the long line of Muhammads. ‘We have ...”

“... for money on teaching and journalism, particularly for the Philosophical Magazine, edited by William Francis (later of Taylor and Francis, the popular scientific publisher). Tyndall had been writing essays and poems for publication for years, but now discovered he had a great gift for clearly explaining new approaches to science. Francis liked him ...”

“... common law and subject to its constraints. It was so when Elizabeth I’s autocratic successor, James I and VI, wanted to rule by proclamation; it was so in 2010 when Theresa May wanted to use the royal prerogative to bypass Parliament; it was still so in 2017 when it was proposed that the UK leave the EU by ministerial fiat rather than parliamentary ...”

“... and ‘Hamiltonised’, as Keith Lehrer puts it, by the respectable but inferior philosopher Sir William Hamilton. In the second place, he suffered greatly in the collapse of the great tradition of Scottish philosophy, caused principally by an influx of scholars from south of the border. In the third place and fourth place, it may be noted that, although he ...”