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“... Company and that any swing to the canefields of Bengal would enormously enrich their enemies. James Cropper, the Liverpool merchant who concocted the programme of equalisation of duties in 1822, perceived immediately that he would be accused – even by allies – of working for his own ends: ‘Some friends think,’ he wrote to the Birmingham merchant ...”

“... natural casting as a failure. He is a classic writer, in the old Esquire tradition, a lesser James Salter, and a dedicated ladies’ man. Specktor’s chapter on him turns into a synopsis for a screwball movie with its account of the filming of what became 92 in the Shade (1975).McGuane and his first wife, Becky, lived in glamorously wild places ...”

“... Revolution. In Locke’s stead, Pocock drew attention to the less celebrated achievement of James Harrington (1611-77) and to his use of a classical idiom of republican citizenship. Classical republicanism turned out to be a vital hidden ingredient in the history of English political thought, which assumptions about the importance of a Lockean language ...”

“... essay on Carlo Ginzburg, Calvino suggests that the role of the critic might equate to that of the hunter or the lover, but might also degenerate to that of a policeman. ‘The curse of our century’ (he is writing about both states and critics) ‘is that every cognitive interest is transformed into an accusation.’ Intellectuals are always ‘in search of ...”

“... Rex Ingram’s The Magician (1926), drawn from a Maugham novel, mysteriously incorporated into the James Whale Frankenstein and subsequently acquiring the generic name of Igor – by his grudging response to one of the few occasions when a disability materialises as an aspect of the hero. Howard Breslin’s short story ‘Bad Day at Honda’ has an explicitly ...”

“... FitzGerald, as he continued to tinker, seems not to have known how absolute they were. Should the Hunter of the East, in the first stanza, catch the Sultan’s Turret in a Noose of Light, or with a Shaft of Light? It makes very little difference, but the alterations confuse the movement of stanzas which would otherwise stay perfectly in the memory. Though ...”

“... rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner and make love in between, without being hunter, fisher, herder, critic or lover. As ever, we are not told how. Nevertheless, simple, even simple-minded, and derivative though it is, Heath’s little book does develop in one direction that does not so far seem to have interested Foucault or anyone else ...”

“... be far better at home, but the mind wants a change. In several of Ian Fleming’s thrillers James Bond (who is much more interested in food and drink than in sex and killing people) derides the lyric menus of the American eatery, promising flaky-fresh sole and dawn-tender steak: he never orders anything with his bourbon but eggs benedict, or scrambled ...”

“... Lighthouse by the great civil engineer John Smeaton; and the development of the steam engine by James Watt. There were also the achievements of James Cook, the son of a Yorkshire labourer, who, after surveying Newfoundland between 1763 and 1767, made three voyages to the Pacific, charting the coasts of New Zealand, the ...”

“... wheels and the champagne. An accident brings him to the notice of Roscoe Hamilton, a big-game hunter who is planning an expedition to China to track down ‘a special kind of black and white bear’. Hamilton takes an immediate fancy to Edmund. ‘You remind me of Chingachgook’ he announces, not altogether plausibly. (Edmund comments, even less ...”

“... off-putting model. One readily sees why scrupulous users of English would want to shy from it, as James Greene also does in his translations from Afanasy Fet, which Henry Gifford introduces with a monitory subtext of disengagement: ‘Russian poetry even today keeps the formality of structure, the regular positioning of rhyme, and the canonical metres.’ The ...”

“... buffs will chase without worrying too much what he is writing about. One of those elephantine Hunter S. Thompson, self-cannibalising careers that define the point where it all went wrong, where the floating signifier began to get above itself and spit like a snake. Penman’s value lies in the way he occupies this clerical post, as ...”

“... heterosexual and needed to feel invested in his work – indeed, he would have an affair with Kim Hunter, the actress he cast as Stella. But beyond that he made a production that celebrated Stanley as a force of nature. No one was more aware of this, or more troubled by it, than Jessica Tandy, who as Blanche felt increasingly intimidated by Brando’s taking ...”

“... and John Barrymore, thought him more remarkable than any of them. On screen, his name appeared as James Stewart, and he worked hard at every detail. He was a canny businessman. Before the Second World War, he invested in a small airline. Soon after the war, taking advantage of the new freedom from studio contracts, he was one of the first actors to arrange to ...”

“... Victorian novelist. As for the sartorial descriptions in Surtees, they resemble nothing so much as James Joyce when the latter is indulging his appetite for specificity about garments and their constituents to the hilt – as in the Circe episode of Ulysses. There are so many of these passages in Surtees that it is hard to select one for quotation, and the ...”