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“... girl in the world . . .’ Wednesday. None of the crew is out of his twenties. Three Scots lads: James, Brennan and Hamish. Hamish leads us, a silent group of eight, down pontoons to the boat. It’s a glorious day. The sea sparkles, the sky is blue, the hills of Ardnamurchan and Sunart, across the water, seem slightly amazed by the light. As we nose out of ...”

“... of 1688 and the extent of support for the cause (so called because ‘Jacobus’ was the Latin for James, and James II was the monarch overthrown at the revolution). If the Jacobite challenge had been serious and substantial, why had its impact on the course of British history been so limited? By the lights of the Whig ...”

“... When Henry James’s play, Guy Domville, was booed off the London stage, the embarrassed author remarked that at least some of the audience was clapping. These approvers were powerless to out-clamour the ‘hoots and jeers and catcalls of the roughs’, whose roars were ‘like those of a cage of beasts at some infernal zoo’, but for James they represented ‘the forces of civilisation ...”

“... modelling begin with DICE, and anything that deviates from it must be justified. The 2006 Stern Report, for example, which uses an alternative IAM, expends a good deal of energy justifying its non-Nordhausian choices.We know that Nordhaus’s cost-benefit models, for reasons technical and political, massively underestimate the scale and scope of the ...”

“... off from New York to Ireland to find out whether or not he is the great-great-grandson of the poet James Clarence Mangan. Jamie’s father had once halfheartedly tried this, but he wasn’t prey to a sufficiently insatiable hunger for the quest. But then it is Jamie, not his father, who bears an uncanny resemblance to the man in an heirloom daguerrotype which ...”

“... in 1927, then under the protection of the League of Nations, and like Charles Dickens, Jan Neruda, James Joyce, Theodor Fontane and his acknowledged exemplar Alfred Döblin, he places his native city at the centre of his creative imagination. Grass’s best work so far is given over, again and again, to its evocation: a very special piety ties him to the ...”

“... theatres. Yet even when he wrote this essay, he had doubts about Wagner and Bayreuth. In J.P. Stern’s Introduction Nietzsche’s diary is quoted: Wagner had nothing more, Nietzsche said there, than a synthetic ‘actor’s nature’. Nietzsche came to suspect that the prophet of Bayreuth was merely the final – essentially unchanged – version of the ...”

“... lax morals. The female dunnock often takes not one but two males as partners. The best a stern man of religion could say about dunnocks is that there’s no superfluous bump and grind when they mate – it’s strictly fertilisation business, over in 0.1 seconds. Fast enough to do it while your mother’s back is turned. Tim Birkhead and his fellow ...”

“... variously and with high composure, that there is something more primary than enlightenment. Henry James said of Eugénie de Guérin and her piety, what could not be said of Heaney and his, that she ‘was certainly not enlightened’. Yet when James went on, ‘But she was better than this – she was light itself,’ the ...”

“... Auden always in some sense stayed at home: a friend he met after his translation to America, James Stern, later described him as ‘the most unalterably English, the most unlikely expatriate’, and Nicholas Nabokov similarly spoke with affection of Auden’s ‘clumsy laughter, his assertive way of telling not quite exportable (English ...”

“... Murdoch finds neurotic and unvirtuous. Perhaps her novels are the aesthetic sacrifices to her stern metaphysics. Likewise, it seems significant that while it is philosophically important for novelists to attend to other people, Murdoch has little interest in the aesthetic quality of that otherness. She uses Tolstoy and Shakespeare, in a sense, to close ...”

“... Randall Jarrell’s possible suicide, Bill’s own depression. And I talked to him about William James’s own breakdown and his resuscitation through faith. What in hell am I doing with all these theatre types? Alfred Kazin’s journals, 26 December 1986 Discount Kazin’s weary, load-bearing sigh in this characteristic entry from his journals, which ...”

“... of the King Edward potato, adding perfunctorily that it was not ‘an eating potato’. Henry James would have seen the point. In 1870 he wrote to his elder brother William from Malvern, England, where the hotel fed him mostly on mutton and potatoes, to say how much he missed ‘unlimited tomatoes & beans & peas & squash & turnips & carrots & corn – I ...”

“... nestled as close as the sanction of alcohol allowed, and at the end she gave his hand a sharp, stern, quite sober squeeze. It took very clear signals to burn through his fog of shyness and connubial inertia, but she had enough expertise to know that, once ignited, he would blaze. This is nice, high-class, thoroughly professional prose – gossip in ...”

“... there was a partial, temporary and gingerly link-up, initiated by Virginia Woolf; and all along James Strachey, born to be Bloomsbury but in love with Rupert Brooke, functioned as a sort of inter-coterie courier. So it’s easy to get confused, and although, like most generalisations, Delany’s compare-and-contrast exercise is contestable on this or that ...”