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“... The epigraphs of P.D. James (now that she has taken to using them) are important. ‘There’s this to say for blood and breath,’ runs the latest one, from A.E. Housman: ‘They give a man a taste for death.’ Are we being directed to hold in mind those other lines of Housman’s? Oh like enough ’tis blood, my dear, For when the knife has slit The throat across from ear to ear ’Twill bleed because of it ...”

“... to be topping the charts. A week later, as things warmed up for spring, Grisham was trailing P.D. James, whose new Death in Holy Orders was ahead by a nose (5408 units to 5061), and Matthew Kneale slipped to seventh place, behind Anita Shreve, Jack Higgins, Paul Eddy and Catherine Cookson, without sales falling off too dramatically, as a respectable 1366 ...”

“... Baroness James, making a rare visitation to a blighted metropolitan zone, downriver of Tower Bridge, has written a very useful book, a book on which I will be happy to draw for years to come. That was back in 1972. Title? The Maul and the Pear Tree; co-authored by T.A. Critchley of the Police Department at the Home Office, where James then earned her crust as a Principal in the Criminal Policy Department ...”

“... the latter are more ‘literary’. This is all the difference between Innocent Blood and P.D. James’s detective stories. It is frightfully ‘literary’ – wordy and uneconomical, over-determining the characters with fussy attentions, careless about hard facts and loaded with literary quotations. Like a detective story, on the other hand, it has pace ...”

“... was published that it was ‘rather too light & bright & sparkling; – it wants shade.’ P.D. James’s Death Comes to Pemberley follows in this shady tradition. In her preface, James apologises to Austen for ‘involving her beloved Elizabeth in the trauma of a murder investigation’, and imagines Austen replying ...”

“... and the Warden, and is told by Xan that he desires the end but closes his eyes to the means. P.D. James has two themes here. One is about the baneful effect of a hedonistic eugenic tyranny where those who don’t go voluntarily to their Quietus are delivered to it by force, and the other, developed in the book’s second half, about human redemption through ...”

“... since when did that really matter in crime fiction? – and sternly says that P.D. James’s Adam Dalgliesh, for example, ‘lacks verisimilitude as a policeman, if not as a person’. He also says rather oddly that ‘stories about a criminal, no matter how excellent they are in their own right, can never be as attractive as stories about a ...”

“... of natural causes, all human life would be destroyed in a meteor strike. Or suppose, as in P.D. James’s novel The Children of Men (loosely adapted as a film by Alfonso Cuarón in 2006), you learned that the human species as a whole had become infertile. Scheffler predicts that we would react to either scenario with what he calls (‘with bland ...”

“... no such misgivings. Does this mean ceasing to discriminate between literature and yarns? Professor James Naremore, in Professor Bernard Benstock’s symposium, seems to imply that it does. Dashiell Hammett, he writes, ‘challenges the easy distinctions between popular and high art, and the critical language that normally sustains those ...”

“... your thought’. She is delighted to accept. This is joltingly hard to read today – even P.D. James, no slave to political correctness, calls it ‘blatant misogyny’. It goes a long way to ruining what is otherwise a prime example of golden age detective fiction. Sayers gets into similar difficulties with the character of Harriet Vane, who is unmarried ...”

“... of the backpacking generation’. Not all ladies have become women. In a chapter here on P.D. James, Martin Priestman records her distrust of ambitious professional women, approval of loyal housekeepers and disdain for people who say ‘toilet’ when they mean ‘lavatory’. At one point she feels the need to remind herself that not everyone wants to ...”

“... love-it/hate-it responses to 50 titles, and it tells you which are the books for you (for me, P.D. James and Goethe). If you have an American bank account, or internationally recognised plastic, Amazon.com will supply British customers in much the same way that (in defiance of rights’ conventions, as I understand them) Blackwell’s has been supplying the ...”

“... have recently provided the material for works by artists as different from each other as P.D. James, DV8 Physical Dance Theatre and David Lynch. Stephen Egger, an American academic and former policeman who wrote the first doctoral dissertation on the phenomenon, gives a definition/description of serial murder in Serial Murder: An Elusive Phenomenon: A ...”

“... Christian apologist, and I was, I confess, the man who had not read The Man Who Was Thursday. P.D. James, in her introduction to a selection of Father Brown stories, says: ‘Chesterton never wrote an inelegant or clumsy sentence.’ Almost everyone reaches for the word ‘genial’ when they talk about him, and we are told that he loved to argue. All of these ...”

“... of young, vulnerable women wandering alone in the gloom. In The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James sends Isabel Archer boldly marching by herself through the ‘thick brown air’ from Euston to Piccadilly. Corton, however, suggests that the fog is ‘a metaphorical representation of this lack of light in her life, the obscurity of her emotional ...”