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“... was, by the way, a more serious scholar than Sutherland makes out) and so did the next professor, James Sutherland, another devoted researcher. But after this rather lengthy lapse the old Gower Street concordat between scholarship and journalism was, against some dryasdust opposition, revived, and the most recent incumbents, myself, Karl Miller and John ...”

“... of the shadow of death; make a joyful noise; go from strength to strength . . . The 1611 King James Authorised Version of the Book of Psalms – and of course of the entire Bible – is so deep in the English language that we no longer know when we are repeating its phrases. Inextricable from the beliefs and practices of its faithful for four hundred ...”

“... Not long ago, James Wolcott wrote an article for the New Yorker lamenting the ‘softened, juvenilised’, timbre of modern female journalism. In the old days, he said, women like Germaine Greer and Valerie Solanas made men nervous. They produced feisty, aggressive prose. They were rude and polemical. They wrote, in Norman Mailer’s words, like ‘very tough faggots ...”

“... call to the author’s publicist, and the rest would probably come up if an agent googled, say, ‘James Baldwin communist?’ Like lazy students of literature everywhere, the agents filing reports didn’t usually bother to do their reading. In the documents collected here only the report on Norman Mailer’s Miami and the Siege of Chicago delivers the ...”

“... In this account – inherited from early colonial philologists and historians such as William Jones and James Mill – the subcontinent had belonged since prehistoric times to one continuous, indigenous Vedic civilisation, shattered in 1192 by the first Islamic invasions.To its sympathisers, the new government is ...”

“... of age in the 1930s and 1940s and included Richard Wright (born 1908), Ralph Ellison (1914) and James Baldwin (1924), Himes has never quite entered the pantheon. His peers were condescending: Wright never took him seriously as an artist; Ellison, who saw him as little more than an ex-con with a pen, joked that Himes must have been the model for Bigger ...”

“... down the ranks. Muir has countless examples of young men watching their own stock fall. William Jones, curate of the parish of Broxbourne in Hertfordshire, got by on £60 a year and considered himself worse off than ‘a bricklayer’s labourer or the turner of a razor grinder’s wheel’; Basil Hall, the son of ...”

“... old verses (after all, he reminded me, Arabs have produced good translations of Dylan Thomas and James Joyce) and was put out when I rejected them and gave him the new simplistic piece: but I was determined to ‘make my position clear’, so that no one thought me to represent some devious British foreign policy (if such there be) connected with the Gulf ...”

“... about its Dutch origins and its tulip festival, and named after our least successful king, James II, when he was Duke of York and Albany. One year, when I told friends in Manhattan that I was going to Albany to hear the hippy, marijuana-influenced poems of a Londoner who was living with another poet, half-Negro and half-Cherokee, the New York City ...”

“... The president​ in question is Jonathan Lincoln Duncan. He’s a Gulf veteran and former prisoner of war, an Army Ranger who was tortured in Iraq but didn’t betray his comrades or his country. He’s also a former governor of North Carolina, the state he was born in and where he was brought up by his single mother. He married his law school sweetheart (called, bizarrely, Rachel Carson), and they had one child, a daughter ...”

“... Coast and Europe descended on the town of Rawlins, fifty miles north of the Colorado state line. James Craig Watson, the director of the Ann Arbor Observatory, and Simon Newcomb, from the Naval Observatory in Washington, were among those hoping to catch a first definitive glimpse of Vulcan, though others had other purposes: Thomas Edison wanted to test one ...”

“... sphygmomanometers that had become available for the accurate measurement of blood pressure. Sir James Mackenzie, the patron, and Thomas Lewis, the leader of the scientific school and as much a physiologist as a physician, still held that ‘the trained finger’ was the best instrument for measuring arterial pressure. Science made perhaps its first ...”

“... ill to hold the pen himself and dictated it to be typed and signed by his secretary at the Brynmor Jones Library in Hull. He told Amis he was going into hospital that day for more tests – ‘only tests, but of course they are looking for something, and I bloody well hope they don’t find it.’ Still, he tried not to sound too downcast. ‘Don’t get ...”

“... private friends, any private life. George Spater quotes from some notes made by Cobbett’s son, James, who was projecting a biography but found the task difficult, as well he might. In 1865, James wrote of his father: He had but little individual attachment. Liked people’s company; – they liked his (when he was ...”

“... an old plot device. Pamela complains about the important letter to her mother that is stolen; Tom Jones has to leave home because the letter that contains the secret of his birth is misdirected; Tess writes a letter of confession to Angel Clare, but it slips beneath the carpet and is never delivered. Letters have been an uncertain way to communicate in ...”