“... cheering, great sociability. A ball is arranged, but before it the Captain of the Alcyone, Sir Henry Somerset, and his wife ask Talbot to dinner: he is still somewhat dazed from bangs on the head and heavy doses of the ship’s panacea, a tincture of opium, but he goes and he is instantly enraptured by Miss Chumley, an orphan Lady Somerset is taking out to ...”

“... only knew when a painting had undergone heavy restoration but pretended to at least one client (Henry Goldman in 1914) that it was in pristine condition. ‘The bloom of the ages remains as in a fresh flower,’ he said of that particular Fra Angelico. Nor was Berenson altogether the corrupted Faust to Duveen’s Mephistopheles. There were occasions when he ...”

“... of Europe’. Ventriloquism remained a favourite theme for hyperbole throughout the 19th century. Henry Cockton’s novel The Life and Adventures of Valentine Vox, Ventriloquist, first serialised in the 1830s and still in print when Queen Victoria died, popularised the implausible idea that ventriloquists can ‘throw’ their voices like squibs and leave ...”

“... in 1939 in the avant-garde Paris literary journal Volontés, which also published Raymond Queneau, Henry Miller, Octavio Paz and Pablo Neruda.Return to My Native Land is often situated in the French literary tradition, and discussed in relation to Césaire’s major stylistic influences – Lautréamont, Claudel, Rimbaud, Apollinaire. But the poem is also part ...”

“... and Anton Raphael Mengs. She met and formed a lasting friendship with John Soane, but it was Henry Fuseli whose ‘extraordinary visions struck my fancy’. He inspired some of the best of her later work. Without her father, however, the family business did not flourish and her mother, of whom nobody, including Maria, seems to have had much good to ...”

“... of key religious figure such as Stephen Marshall, Cornelius Burges, John Goodwin, Edmund Calamy, Henry Burton and others. They flit tantalisingly through the pages of Valerie Pearl’s valuable study of the London revolution of 1641, or Anthony Fletcher’s equally important analysis of petitioning on the eve of Civil War. It is no paradox to say that we are ...”

“... if he cannot earn his own living?’ More startled than stung, Jung rallied and through sheer will power began to resist the faints, which had taken on a life of their own. It was his first experience of what it was to overcome a neurosis. He grew to the size of a Notre Dame linebacker, as the Harvard psychologist ...”

“... on and off, since last September. As the crew packs up I go and have another look at the tomb of Henry III’s children in the south ambulatory which I’ve just read incorporates one of the medieval relics of the Abbey, the stone supposedly with the imprint of Christ’s foot when he took off for the Ascension. I’m not sure if this is the square stone on ...”

“... to offer us the young lovers’ impressions of the performance they’re witnessing. One thinks of Henry James’s remark in the Preface to Roderick Hudson about the artist’s need to draw a circle around relations that really stop nowhere: the young Roussel seems unaware of this need. Texts like La Seine or Claude et Luce might continue for ...”

“... a generally rather crude and flat book, but Roth’s next novel, Hotel Savoy (1924), suggests the power of the more mature writer. It tells the story of Gabriel Dan, who has spent three years in a Siberian POW camp and who has ended up in an unnamed Eastern European town, as a resident of the enormous Hotel Savoy, which is full of the refugees of war ...”

“... seemed to imagine that common sense was socialism. As if all that were not enough, he thought Henry Miller was an outstanding novelist. As judicious (though not hopelessly balanced) accounts, the new biographies by Gordon Bowker and D.J. Taylor confirm what the law of averages might have led one to suspect: some of this is true, some of it questionable ...”

“... might put ‘the initial schizoid organisation’ to good use in ‘authentic versions of freedom, power and creativity’.) If what Auden called ‘mad Ireland’ at once politicised and pathologised the condition, Longley was never in any doubt that the organisation of his mind was established long before what he called ‘the sticky intimate violence of our ...”

“... is striking five when we turn back, the waterfall now illuminated under its own self-generated power, the same power that once lit the whole village, and I suppose one day might have to do so again. 8 January. I spend a lot of time these days just tidying up and today I start on my notebooks. Around 1964 I took to ...”

“... Street, in the de Maistre studio-salon, I met other more or less important people, among them Henry Moore, Graham Sutherland, Francis Bacon, as well as Douglas Cooper … I got to know Francis when he designed some furniture for my Eccleston Street flat. I like to remember his beautiful pansy-shaped face, sometimes with too much lipstick on it … In ...”

“... militarily but had to adapt to West African social structures and customs. In Bonny, for example, power was held by an elective but absolute ruler who regulated exchange and credit transfers and guaranteed debts between native and foreign traders. In Old Calabar, human ‘pawns’ – free people – could be confiscated and sold if slaves or other purchased ...”