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“... as something that, being broken, was only fit for abuse.’ In his new novel, Pilcrow, Adam Mars-Jones slips in a quick reference to ‘One Arm’, when the narrator, a disabled boy called John Cromer, tells us that he and a schoolfriend ‘wept together over “One Arm” – Jimmy’s tears the more surprising since he knew the story so ...”

“... and futility that they could be comprehended in one glance.’ Comprehended by whom? Edward P. Jones is unfashionably interested in fate and endings, and likes to gaze at the wide horizons of his characters’ extinctions. His remarkable novel, The Known World (2003), owes something to The Mayor of Casterbridge: in it he broods knowingly, like Hardy, over ...”

“... to score in argument. ‘His forte was the quick and clever or even clever-clever,’ Stephen Hugh-Jones, a former student, remarks. His old antagonist, Meyer Fortes, the professor of social anthropology at Cambridge, said that Leach had the public schoolboy notion that just by turning an argument on its head you were being original. Leach more or less ...”

“... the maiden’s cheek, and fell upon the faded chintz. You guessed it. Who could it be but Henry James? There would be no shame in your not recognising this as James’s work, however: it has languished in peaceful obscurity for more than 140 years, only now to have its authorship revealed by Floyd Horowitz, recently ...”

“... and recover what might be the remains of a missing Canadian Seventh-Day Adventist called Timothy Jones, from deep in the jungle: As they left the mesa and descended toward a creek deep in a ravine . . . there came a faint crackling from somewhere behind the next peak, and they fell under the shadow of a mass of smoke in the sky ahead of them, a black ...”

“... of an underworld brawler. The former heavyweight champion is no less threatening in Thom Jones’s two previous collections of short stories; though kept in the wings, he is mentioned frequently by the centre-stage characters: a doctor who is ‘about to smirk’ when walking in on a couple having sex in the hospital ward is arrested by the ...”

“... the reclusive Heyst, on an island near Borneo, is invaded by the British and ‘gentlemanly’ Mr Jones and his curiously Cockneyfied secretary, Ricardo, from Latin America, seeking to destroy him. Conrad has plausible reasons for this incursion – which Pinter plays down. Conrad also offers the invaders a ‘symbolic’ status. Heyst says of ...”

“... with scenes of Alexander’s campaigns, made for Prince Henry Frederick, the eldest son of James I. Nearly all these portrayals show Alexander in a positive light, but the story told by modern historians and even some ancient ones is more complex. Alexander came to the throne of Macedon in 336 bc, aged twenty, after his father, Philip II, was ...”

“... much to shape British social history over the last four decades: Ross McKibbin, Gareth Stedman Jones and Patrick Joyce. I should say before I go any further that I too am a modern British historian: this is my subject and my tribe. I’ve met the dedicatees, most of the editors and a majority of the contributors to these volumes; a few are good ...”

“... not, it is sometimes suggested, have taken place at all. In the case of Prince Henry, the son of James I who died in 1612 at the age of 18, romantic counterfactual possibilities began to gather round his memory almost at once. Those who found King James unsatisfactory for his reluctance to enter the Thirty Years’ War or ...”

“... if you take into account what Moss calls ‘their chums from other disciplines – Clive James, Craig Raine, James Fenton, Christopher Hitchens, Redmond O’Hanlon’. Together, novelists and ‘chums’ are not unlike a coterie of window-cleaners crowded onto a single boatswain’s chair (or rather bench): each ...”

“... to be topping the charts. A week later, as things warmed up for spring, Grisham was trailing P.D. James, whose new Death in Holy Orders was ahead by a nose (5408 units to 5061), and Matthew Kneale slipped to seventh place, behind Anita Shreve, Jack Higgins, Paul Eddy and Catherine Cookson, without sales falling off too dramatically, as a respectable 1366 ...”

“... judgment was handed down in a case brought against Macmillan and Danis Rose by the estate of James Joyce. Ulysses: A Reader’s Edition, edited by Rose, was published by Macmillan in 1997. Joyce died in 1941, and under the Copyright Act 1956 any of his work that appeared while he was alive passed out of copyright on 1 January 1992. Three days later, Rose ...”

“... the oddness of some of the president’s other appointments and his treatment of them. General James Jones, whom Obama had never met, was asked to become national security adviser. Once chosen, he hardly ever saw the president alone. To head the CIA Obama picked Leon Panetta, a former congressman who had served as Bill Clinton’s chief of ...”

“... he means those over forty – ‘make the best subjects,’ which would explain the contents (James Hewitt to Henry Kissinger by way of Geoffrey Boycott, Charlton Heston, Dave Lee Travis and Norman Tebbit), but you have to wonder how much of a coincidence it is that men over forty not only ‘make the best subjects’ but also make the best Telegraph ...”