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“... near-homophonous Alistair MacNeill; two of his screenplays had already been turned into novels by John Denis; and a third screenplay is undergoing similar treatment by Simon Gandolfi. In this curious world there are occasional legal hiccups. One such, not so much a hiccup as a cardiac arrest, recently befell HarperCollins when they were prosecuted and heavily ...”

“... her latest reviews. Her monologue is not only a tour de force in the manner of Mrs Gamp and Mr Collins but a piece of criticism as penetrating as it is accidental. The accents of contemporary megalomania are perfectly caught. Some of my very best work went into that book and they’re treating it like a Mills and Boon potboiler, it just doesn’t make ...”

“... The​ 1996 film Michael Collins shows a badly wounded James Connolly being carried on a stretcher to a chair in Kilmainham Gaol, to which he is tied before being shot by a British firing squad. Connolly was one of the fifteen rebel leaders executed in May 1916 for their part in the Easter Rising, when at least 1200 rebels battled the British forces in Dublin for six days with the aim of establishing an Irish republic ...”

“... The Republic: The Fight for Irish Independence, the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) leader, John O’Leary who, in Yeats’s poem, shared his grave with the corpse of ‘romantic Ireland’, observing that the Brotherhood’s ‘propagandist work was … entirely separatist with practically no reference to Republicanism’. Similarly, and just as ...”

“... mean something like ‘went boldly on public record’. To his intimates he was candid enough. To John Blaikie, one of his earliest friends, he recounted in 1874 how, on the occasion of an accident that had put him in fear of death, ‘the Christian revealed religion had never seemed so little worthy of belief.’ When A.C. Benson asked him what he believed ...”

“... poet who had some capital. But the firm only took off with the acquisition a few years later of John Hotten’s, Henry Bohn’s and John Maxwell’s publishing properties. Macmillan absorbed the house of Bentley in 1898; Murray absorbed Smith, Elder in 1917; between the wars, according to Ian Norrie, Hutchinson ...”

“... it’s OK to carry on with the experiment. Neil Armstrong, the first man on the Moon, and Michael Collins, who circled the Moon while the first two men walked on it, years later admitted to each other that they privately put the mission’s chance of success (read: survival) at 50-50. That level of risk is no longer acceptable for anything carried on in the ...”

“... makes Léa give Chéri up for a biologically-appropriate wife. ‘Men,’ man-in-the-news Iron John Bly reports, ‘are more lonesome in every generation.’ In the last few days, as I’ve been getting more and more inflamed in my thoughts about the human (i.e. female, i.e. menopausal) condition, I’ve been hearing a lot about how hard it is being a man ...”

“... were culled from the Bookseller). The current situation in the hit parade is this: were it not for John Grisham, whose A Painted House was leading Matthew Kneale’s English Passengers by 7201 ‘units’ – which presumably means ‘books’ – to 1964 for the week ending 24 February 2001, the end of February would be one of the less impressive times of ...”

“... then just out of his teens; a couple of years earlier he had been sought out by an older artist, John Linnell, who had seen and admired his work. Palmer wrote that God had sent Linnell ‘to pluck me from the pit of modernity’. Through Linnell, who was his friend and patron and later his father-in-law, Palmer met William Blake. It was the light of Blake ...”

“... be ideologically sound. Mavericks were common, but true outsiders not. Augustan conformity had its Collins and its Blake and Smart: its mad poets who kicked over the traces. Victorian poetry had to have its nonsense and its horror writers, its Lears and Carrolls and Cities of Dreadful Night. Our version of this today might be Larkinian lugubriousness and ...”

“... Forest with a guest appearance by Sterne, Constable’s Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows, a John Martin and a Turner, with snatches of poems by Wordsworth and Coleridge, and echoes of De Quincey, Shelley, Frankenstein (not sure about that); and then on to Samuel Palmer to Wuthering Heights to Ford Madox Brown to George Eliot to Whistler to Edwin Drood ...”

“... turnover in 1994. Why was the Thunderer so excited? One reason, as cynics noted, was that Harper-Collins, the publisher leading the charge against the NBA, is Murdoch-owned. Another is that the Times has strenuously opposed the NBA (or its equivalent) for 143 years or more. The paper’s opposition has taken the form of unwavering editorial hostility and, on ...”

“... subtitle might regrettably have carried. The reduction of Anna Ford to the thinking man’s Jackie Collins is complete. This is to state an undoubted unfairness to the intentions of the author, in the presentation of her book. On Ms Ford’s account, its germ is her undergraduate study of social anthropology. There is a fair show of primary research behind ...”

“... John Franklin (1786-1847) was the most famous vanisher of the Victorian era. He joined the Navy as a midshipman at the age of 14, and fought in the battles of Copenhagen and Trafalgar. When peace with the French broke out, he turned his attention to Arctic exploration, and in particular to solving the conundrum of the Northwest Passage, the mythical clear-water route which would, if it existed, link the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans above the northern coast of the American continent ...”