“... Henry James was a generous correspondent in more senses than one, but his fellow writers may have found some of the Master’s letters rather exasperating. ‘I read your current novel with pleasure,’ he wrote to William Dean Howells in 1880, ‘but I don’t think the subject fruitful, & I suspect that much of the public will agree with me ...”

“... Jenny McMorris’s biography marked the 75th anniversary of Henry Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage. He is, it’s fair to say, remembered for that book (known, simply, as Fowler) and not for his work as a lexicographer. Fowler is the sacred text of the linguistically self-conscious. McMorris quotes a distinguished judge who ‘had been kept from his bed by it “to a very unusual hour”, adding that it brought “a terror to living and writing” ...”

“... it when he ascribed to Richard ‘fitful inconstancy, an insane pride, and a craving for absolute power’. The first wave of professional academic historians, notably William Stubbs and his pupil T.F. Tout, did much to illuminate the mechanisms of Richard’s rule but they found the conundrum of his personality hard to solve. Stubbs felt that Richard’s ...”

“... Morningside Heights there’s an enormous residential tower which in 1932 replaced the Henry James, an apartment house built at the turn of the 20th century and advertised to appeal to ‘refined persons’. When William Dean Howells first told James about the building, James replied that the news ‘at once deeply agitated & wildly ...”

“... all is the fear of the eternal flames, the begging to die and to be taken into God’s bliss. The power of this terrible creed, soon to be subsumed into Wesleyanism proper, is sustained by the crazed and superhuman energy of the itinerant preachers who tramp over the moors, through the burns, from village to village and town to town, commanding the ...”

“... not quite unscathed, perhaps. One of the best essays in this book deals with the night scene in Henry V. On the eve of Agincourt, the King, disguised, moves among the common soldiers and is drawn into an argument about the war in which they are all engaged. It is a scene from which, through the centuries, commentators have flinched. The truth is that we are ...”

“... in 1653, Arthur Wilson wrote: ‘I see no reason why princes (towering in the height of their own power) should think themselves so far above ordinary mortals, that their actions are to be incomprehensible. This is but a weakness, contracted in the high place they look down from.’ The execution of Charles I in Whitehall in 1649 prompted (in England, at ...”

“... in the role might be transferred from one household to another, as was likely the case with one of Henry VIII’s fools, Sexton, previously the property of Cardinal Wolsey. In the mid-1530s, a new avenue of recruitment opened up. Monasteries and nunneries often took in the intellectually disabled, in line with the medieval theological view that ...”

“... for human well-being; yet not as ideologues or even, it would seem, in committees. It is ‘the power of committees in the administration and funding of science’ that made nuclear reactors into ‘toys for the rich’ acting ‘mostly for evil’, and gave us ‘the laptop computer and the cellular telephone’ as ‘the latest of the new toys’. The ...”

“... only pebble on the beach’ was the title of a 19th-century song that has become a saying. ‘Dear Henry,’ William James wrote to his physician friend Henry Bowditch, ‘you see that you are not the only pebble on the beach, or toad in the puddle of senile degeneration.’ ‘What is a pebble?’ is the opening sentence of ...”

“... it here is that liberty is the absence of dependence, and that the mere presence of arbitrary power, whether or not it is exercised in ways that limit the freedom of action, is enough to transform the status of free men into that of slaves. Liberty, in other words, can be lost even in the absence of actual interference. The very existence of arbitrary ...”

“... I think’. Eight years later, by which time her passionate affair with Fullerton was long over, Henry James, in one of his last letters to her, confirmed her first thoughts about the man who had fascinated them both. ‘WMF … is the most inscrutable of men – he will never pose long enough for the Camera of Identification.’ Marion Mainwaring, in ...”

“... enacting.Marriages go bad not when love fades … but when [an] understanding about the balance of power breaks down, when the weaker member feels exploited or the stronger feels unrewarded for his or her strength.Some people will find it ‘chilling’ to think of marriage in terms of power relations, Rose supposes, butI ...”

“... would be able to sustain a threat to the infant republic only if succoured by a second outside power in addition to South Africa, and then impelled to fight for the interests decided by that power. If that were to happen the Unita leader, Jonas Savimbi, a Mbundu with an old Lisbon affiliation, might become dangerous, for ...”

“... which is the lachrymose and androgynous Mourning Figure sculpted by August St Guldens for Henry Adams’s unhappy wife Clover (whose name always puts me in mind of an overworked pit pony). And there in the grass is a stone slab, bearing the names and dates of birth of Vidal and his lifelong companion Howard Austen. The hyphens that come after the ...”