“... his long-harboured desire to follow in the footsteps of the great 19th-century Assyriologists: Henry Layard, Hormuzd Rassam, George Smith. Now in his mid-thirties, he is married but childless, and fast running out of money. His wife, Edith, who is with him in the Middle East, fell instantly in love with the fervour of his ambition on the evening they ...”

“... Edward Thomas​ believed that up to about the age of four what he called ‘a sweet darkness’ enfolded him ‘with a faint blessing’. It was, though, a darkness and the blessing was faint. ‘From an early age’, Jean Moorcroft Wilson writes, Thomas ‘felt cursed by a self-consciousness he believed the chief cause of his later problems and depression ...”

“... monarch ever to occupy the English throne. Yet, during a long reign of 44 years, the daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn contrived to steer a middle course in religion between the beliefs of her Catholic subjects on the one hand and clamorous Puritans on the other (the so-called Elizabethan Settlement), evade fatal entanglements, whether marital or ...”

“... take our places at the dinner table at Salisbury Court in November 1583, ‘as in a late novel by Henry James’: ‘who had done what, who knew who had done what, and who knew who knew who had done what.’ Suspicion hung over the scene like a November fog, already a problem in Elizabethan London. (Those making a film of this book will want to know ...”

“... whether Fanny Price should or should not accept the rakish – but seemingly reformed – charmer Henry Crawford. She doesn’t, as it happens, but the narrator tells us that she certainly would have, had things played out slightly differently or taken a bit longer to unravel: ‘Would he have persevered, and uprightly, Fanny must have been his reward, and a ...”

“... out his loft apartment at 143 Prince Street when he received an unexpected visitor. This was Henry Geldzahler, curator of modern art at the Metropolitan Museum. Hughes, probably the most macho and combative critic in his profession, was, by his own account, sweaty, foul-tempered, sore-footed and ‘grey with ingrained dirt’. Geldzahler, a ‘happily ...”

“... for years. I belonged, of course, to the metaphor people and Kleist had made me see that mine was Henry James’s ‘The Jolly Corner’. This is the story of Spencer Brydon, in his mid-fifties, who has spent 33 years abroad enjoying ‘the freedom of a wanderer, overlaid by pleasure, by infidelity’, running away from ‘the ugly things of his faraway ...”

“... snappily dressed, are the noble Jean de Dinteville, ambassador from King Francis I of France to Henry VIII, and his friend, perhaps alter ego, Georges de Selve, who had been given the small see of Lavaur near Toulouse to provide for a career in the royal service. Dinteville was in England from February to November 1533; de Selve, whose mission, if any, is ...”

“... Then, in Mansfield Park, these words start being used in a new way. The stiff pater familias, Sir Thomas Bertram, returns from Antigua to find that his niece Fanny has progressed from ugly duckling to swan. He can’t help perceiving ‘in a grand and careless way’ that the thoroughly eligible Henry Crawford ...”

“... had left out the growth of English Protestantism. Dr Dowling’s study of Humanism in the reign of Henry VIII is, among much else, a good chance to check the significance of this omission. I cannot find in her book any definition which enables me to recognise a Humanist when I meet him or her, but since Dr Dowling will undoubtedly tell me I suffer from ...”

“... these, not radical revisions of transmitted texts and world pictures, occupied the likes of Thomas Thomas and Cantrell Legge. Format and coverage conspire to make the book seem an exercise in that nostalgic obsession with the minutiae of the local past to which Cambridge dons succumb even more readily than their colleagues in other ancient seats of ...”

“... to editing the legal works. The result ranks among the greatest works of Victorian scholarship. Thomas Carlyle called it ‘the hugest and faithfullest bit of literary navvy work I have ever met with in this generation’. Spedding received no payment for his vast labours, but was allowed to buy copies of the finished work at the trade price. He professed ...”

“... broke off the affair. Now, many months later, Bendrix bumps into Sarah’s husband on the Common. Henry Miles confides that he has doubts about Sarah’s fidelity, and has considered employing a private detective to follow her; Bendrix is inspired to have her watched himself. Parkis, the diligently incompetent investigator he hires, gets hold of Sarah’s ...”

“... on 20 May at the Duck and Drake, off the Strand, the lodgings of his cousin and the disciple, Thomas Wintour. Three other men were invited: Jack Wright, a swordsman friend of Catesby’s; Thomas Percy, Wright’s brother-in-law and man of business to his kinsman, the magnate and Councillor the Earl of ...”

“... animals and characters with funny names. I’m not wild about whimsy myself, and a first glance at Thomas Pynchon’s new novel had me worried. I could scarcely be surprised by the funny names or the animals, since Pynchon’s early fiction had people called Dennis Flange, Rachel Owlglass and Emory Bortz, and in Mason & Dixon there is a considerable speaking ...”