“... it my ability to swim is of no avail and I cannot swim after all. Kafka When H.G. Wells accused Henry James of having sacrificed his life to art James replied, with characteristically artful indignation: ‘I live, live intensely, and am fed by life, and my value, whatever it might be, is in my own kind of expression of that. Art makes life, makes ...”

“... protection of reputation. In less inflationary days, Hilaire Belloc’s cautionary tale of Lord Henry Chase set the tone: What happened to Lord Henry Chase? He got into a Libel Case! The Daily Howl had said that he – But could not prove it perfectly To Judge or Jury’s satisfaction: His Lordship, therefore, won the ...”

“... of the Federal ‘land-grant’ institutions, it was designed to train industrial leaders – as Henry Etzkowitz puts it, men ‘who would become top executives rather than end up working for Harvard graduates’ – and produce the sort of large-scale innovations that would spawn entirely new technology-based industries for the Boston region. A ...”

“... escape from the deadening, if steady, hand with which he had governed most aspects of their lives. Power in what many deride as a ‘hereditary republic’ passed to his son, Bashar Assad, without civil war, sectarian violence or a military coup d’état. There was a brief ‘Damascus spring’ when the new, 34-year-old President encouraged citizens to speak ...”

“... wife, as the feeling centre of the play (the result reverses, that is, such images as we meet in Henry James’s stories of artists with ruthless and worldly wives). And to act out his theme Hastings has chosen a figure of public note in a curiously simple and literal sense, an actual near-contemporary of his own. This actuality is important. Tom and Viv ...”

“... his nerves are bad, and ‘I broke down at breakfast – very unwise as it puts me into mother’s power. She is very sweet but it is never safe to be seen in pieces.’ At the beginning of 1925, after the huge success of A Passage to India, his state of mind is revealed in a great paragraph of self-disgust – ‘Famous, wealthy, miserable, physically ugly ...”

“... used, possibly for the last time, to sign the deed of surrender handing the abbey over to Henry VIII’s commissioners. Over at Rievaulx we film in the rain and in the cavernous latrine below the monks’ dormitory. With a lighting cameraman this would have taken most of the day, but brought up in the brisker school of music video Ben Taylor, who ...”

“... Spears and Geruso suggest that ‘it’s time to shake any residual belief in the magic, magnetic power of two.’But the point they want to make above all is that we have got the relationship between population and climate change all wrong. In the 1960s and 1970s, the world seemed to be confronted by the twin threats of overpopulation and ‘global ...”

“... and politically, from a Jeffersonian natural democracy to a Darwinian struggle for survival and power. Ford’s Westerns are in line with Frederick Jackson Turner’s historical account of the frontier, or rather the successive frontiers in the national movement westward, not as a natural affair but as an encounter between culture and nature, a transaction ...”

“... distaff … speech will be the business of men, all men, and of me most of all; for mine is the power in this household.’ And off she goes, back upstairs.2There is something faintly ridiculous about this wet-behind-the-ears lad shutting up the savvy, middle-aged Penelope. But it’s a nice demonstration that right where written evidence for Western ...”

“... argument here which distinguish it from a standard late Romantic defence of the creative power of an author. One is his emphasis on the ‘we’ that seeks national independence. The other is less obvious: he borrows from and transforms, with a quite conscious irony, the 84th Epistle of Seneca, which is about the imitation of earlier authors. Seneca ...”

“... lawyers are a class of the community, who, by study and experience, have acquired the art and power of arranging evidence, and of applying to the points at issue what the law has settled. A lawyer is to do for his client all that the client might fairly do for himself.’ And once the lawyers were involved, other things became axiomatic: that the ...”

“... country for itself, this would be ‘the proudest day in English history’. ‘The transfer of power,’ the Colonial Office proclaimed in 1950, ‘is not a sign of weakness or of liquidation of the Empire, but is, in fact, a sign and source of strength.’ Obviously, the Commonwealth, on which many liberal-imperialist hopes were still pinned, was a ...”

“... serves notice of a stylised view of the world. Themes that recur in Purdy’s later work include power struggles (liable to sudden inversions), extreme emotional states (also subject to reversal), and polar contrasts of riches and poverty, youth and age. Moments of poetic magic rather than developments in plot or character make the experience of reading ...”

“... for dealing with the world crisis. A great borrower, Richards took from the neurologist Henry Head the notion of ‘vigilance’ – ‘what happens in a given stimulus situation varies with the vigilance of the appropriate portion of the nervous system’ – and explained the extraordinary availability of experience to the poet, and his ...”