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“... He​ does not feed like a mongoose,’ James Irving said of the talking mongoose that had taken up residence – or so it was said – in his remote Isle of Man farmhouse in the early 1930s. Irving told psychic investigators that his family had tried the mongoose – who went by the name of ‘Gef’ – on bread and milk, only to have their food rejected ...”

“... parents not just by Denmark’s neocolonial attitudes but by the speed with which a society of hunter-gatherers was hurled into European modernity. In Frederik Nielsen’s novel Tuumarsi, the seal-hunting hero, the founder of a new settlement, is unwittingly living out the last years of the old Greenland. The novel was published in 1934, barely ninety ...”

“... concentrates itself into a complicated meditation on the ethics and aesthetics of biography. James (‘Jimbo’) Petworth Lampitt is an Edwardian belletristic biographer who has done a stylish life of Prince Albert. He is hero-worshipped by Julian’s clergyman uncle Roy, the whole of whose life has been an act of fawning homage to the Lampitt family. He ...”

“... and the lesson it taught him, has remained with him throughout his scientific life. Always a hunter, he extols the joys of the chase in the manner of a 19th-century squire, except that for Wilson the prey are ants and the race is won by the first to identify a species, or to discover a nest in a locale not previously known, or to explain the cause of ...”

“... how Boorman ended up in Soho one night discussing a bad script from a Donald Westlake novel, The Hunter, with Marvin, who was staying in London. ‘What do you think?’ Marvin wanted to know. Boorman said it was clichéd; they bonded over considering it ‘a piece of shit’.That was the start of Point Blank. Boorman thought the central character, then ...”

“... Fuego to the Cree Indians of Northern Canada, Ingold explores the highly developed respect that hunter-gatherer societies have always held for animals, and the ways in which a variety of beliefs, including metempsychosis, influence the hunters’ treatment of their prey; in Cree lore, for example, ‘animals will not return to hunters who have treated them ...”

“... of senile dementia, convinced that the ladies in his boarding-house have designs on the ‘whole hunter’ watch, by means of which his day has been kept safe and predictable for a couple of generations, divided into short walks, rug-making, and striking the gong at his parents’ meal-times. Daisy, his fellow inmate in this womblike existence, a distant ...”

“... horizontal landscape. We could see it was old. The dealer turned it vertically and we saw it was a hunter with a cap. Trees made the cap and bushes the chin. The ears were the target. We bought it.   Back in New York we showed the picture to Panofsky and he said it was of the ‘School of Arcimboldo’. When Alfred did the Surrealism show, he put in a lot ...”

“... argumentative and operating on their own mysterious logic, Hand and Will are rather like Hunter S. Thompson and his sidekick in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. But they don’t do drugs: they do whimsy. Hand, whose real name is Justin, is given to telling people he’s called Sven and breaking into pidgin English. He turns up in Dakar in a shirt ...”

“... Prominent Lebanese Americans like Ralph Nader, Michael DeBakey, William Peter Blatty, Senator James Abourezk and General John Abizaid rarely visited Lebanon itself. As attached as some were to their grandmothers’ cooking and to bits of folklore, they preferred to keep the country at a distance. Anthony Shadid was an exception. As he wrote in this ...”

“... high-profile exemplar of this style was the magnate, George Walker; once, according to James Morton, an ‘ally’ of Billy Hill and Eddie Chapman, later a frequently puffed adornment of the Thatcherite open market culture.) There is nothing new in the concept, quality tailoring bonded over primal naughtiness. It has been spelled out frequently in ...”

“... so much as to be mocked by it. It is difficult to reconcile the author of Utopia with the heretic-hunter of the mid-1520s, who personally broke into Lutherans’ homes and sent men to the stake. It is true that Luther’s challenge, from 1519 onwards, and Henry’s proposed divorce, menaced More with visions of schism, and that the literal defence of the ...”

“... When the King’s printer Robert Barker produced a new edition of the King James Bible in 1631, he overlooked three letters from the seventh commandment, producing the startling injunction: ‘Thou shalt commit adultery.’ Barker was fined £300, and spent the rest of his life in debtors’ prison, even while his name remained on imprints ...”

“... by doing or seeming to do nothing. It was the fashion. Gary Cooper, Clint Eastwood, Lee Marvin, James Coburn, and in England – and in a different, English way – Michael Caine, seldom did anything else. It was also a manner which could not always be easily distinguished from simple idleness. For the first 25 years of Mitchum’s career, his performances ...”

“... swears to live for ever as God’s enemy. In interviews Coppola and the author of the screenplay, James V. Hart, have insisted on the gripping irony of this situation and on their sense of Dracula as a fallen angel. Great love in its bafflement turns to great hatred; even evil may have its origins in strangled or thwarted generosity. Taken out of context, the ...”