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“... Parliament and involved riots and pamphlet wars; eventually, it led to such songs and poems as James Thomson’s ‘Rule, Britannia’ and Robert Burns’s ‘A Parcel of Rogues’. A digital search shows that the words ‘Scots’ and ‘Scotland’ occur nowhere in the London-published 1707 Affairs of State. This tells us something more important about ...”

“... about this undoubtedly American poet. He is the justified sinner whom we meet in the fiction of James Hogg. And he is the superman, the Stavrogin, whom we meet in the fiction of Dostoevsky: the antinomian hero bent both on power and mischief and on the blessedness of the meek, so that he’s Prince Myshkin too, and it’s hardly surprising that he should ...”

“... would spend weeks at a time cooped up in what one them described as ‘a floating steel box’. Edward Pullen, who served in the First World War aboard a destroyer in the North Sea, remembered: There was no life at all aboard a destroyer . . . you couldn’t stand up, you couldn’t sit down and you couldn’t walk about . . . And we always had a rope round ...”

“... the last to be born are, soberingly, Stephen Adrian Lawrence (1974-93, ‘murder victim’) and James Patrick Bulger (1990-93, ‘murder victim’). And so ends the 20th century. Turning from subjects to contributors, the roll-call is undeniably impressive; surely no other project could come near to matching the success of the ODNB in commanding the labour ...”

“... reveal its dark side. Seeing the project through to success became an end in itself. According to James Tuck, a British physicist, Los Alamos was ‘the most exclusive club in the world’, a place where the ‘spirit of Athens, of Plato, of an ideal republic’ prevailed. Oppenheimer, Tuck said, was the source of this spirit. Hans Bethe said that Oppenheimer ...”

“... the first to receive his co-operation over the complete, ten-year span of its writing. The author, James Atlas, whose biography of Delmore Schwartz appeared in 1977 and who is the general editor of the Penguin Lives Series, was given full access to Bellow’s letters and unpublished manuscripts and final permission to quote all the passages he wanted to ...”

“... for France was deep and dangerous. Like many of their kind, they never quite put it behind them. James Neugass, another American impelled to Spain by his convictions, fetched up in a world apart from the propaganda parlours frequented by the Orrs. War Is Beautiful, the diary of his five months as an ambulance driver (November 1937 to April 1938), is surely ...”

“... piece to the earlier novel, in the sense that it too was a first-person narrative, following Edward Manners, an educated and attractive young man, in his cultural and sexual adventures. Hollinghurst extended his range abroad, with much of the book set in Belgium, and may even have taken Baker’s reference to overemphasis on sex as a challenge, in his ...”

“... Sometimes to re-create a colourful milieu, as with the unusual hunting novelist Mrs Edward Kennard, who at 50 in 1900 was a keen auto-mobilist: ‘Reviewers liked her slapdash, highly ungrammatical style of writing in which they discerned “lots of go” and a “thoroughly healthy tone”.’ The plots are often more or less absurd, and ...”

“... he wrote on 28 July 1914. Germany he saw as the ultimate bulwark against Russian barbarism. ‘Sir Edward Grey has betrayed us,’ he wrote on 5 August 1914. On this issue, shattered though he was at the time, he came to change his mind. In Lord Grey of the Reform Bill (1920) he saw the war as having ‘been fought on the principles of Fox and Grey’, and in ...”

“... anthology may not begin with ‘Sunday Morning’, but Jonathan Barker suggests that Ron Butlin, James Lasdun, Oliver Reynolds and other talents have been influenced, like Vendler’s Americans, by the world of Canon Aspirin. This seems doubtful. To read the PBS volume after the Faber Book is to be almost crushed by the pressure of social detail. It is to ...”

“... This conviction even leads him in the last Discourse to quote with approval the opinion of James Harris that ‘we are on no account to expect that fine things should descend to us’ – ‘our taste, if possible, must be made to ascend to them.’ Hence Reynolds endorses the recommendation ‘even to feign a relish, till we find a relish comes; and ...”

“... most playful. But the presence of the Great Modernists feels as remote and irrelevant as that of Edward Marsh’s Georgians.Larkin, the lonely fugitive from poetic Modernism, now looks suspiciously like a one-man tradition. So standard an item in recent collections has the Philip Larkin Memorial Poem become that it now exists as a genre in its own ...”

“... passes as white to marry well. What sets Larsen’s novels apart from other such narratives – James Weldon-Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912), for example – is their resistance to moral didacticism. For one character, passing is merely a question of convenience: ‘restaurants, theatre tickets’. Larsen was born in Chicago in ...”

“... to Arms. The desire for combat is paramount. ‘Not everyone feels such things so intensely,’ James Fenton writes in his introduction to the Everyman edition of the Collected Stories. Many are simply relieved not to have to fight. But the real test for someone of Hemingway’s cast of mind is: to serve in war as a soldier under military ...”