“... when steam was taking over and the increased size of ships meant there were many fewer berths for masters. He started business as a popular novelist with grotesquely inappropriate equipment (Flaubert, Maupassant, James) and never really mastered the themes and the manner of popular romance. Above all, he chose to write English, which was not even his second ...”

“... an illustrated account of the mansion erected on Fifth Avenue, between 51st and 52nd Streets, by William H. Vanderbilt, then the richest man in America. Known as the Triple Palace, the Vanderbilt mansion included a three-storey art gallery (measuring 28 by 36 feet and more than 35 feet high), which was lit during the day by skylights and at night by 169 gas ...”

“... slashing review and the brief glory of a television panel. James’s creatures are Shadbold’s masters, a different galaxy, a pride of publishers, producers, stars and ancient European aristocrats – something like the David Frost Show done by Visconti. Everyone is beautiful except the gossip columnists, and they have all the appropriate faults, from ...”

“... On its cover is a detail from one of the most celebrated of 17th-century genre paintings, William van Haecht’s The Cabinet of Cornelis van der Gheest. A gentleman is admiring a hunting scene while his companions study bronzes by Giambologna or gesture towards Classical statuary. With this jacket, one would be forgiven for thinking that the book will ...”

“... Brooke of Sarawak, John and Henry Lawrence of the Punjab, Charles Gordon, Lawrence of Arabia, William Sleeman who destroyed Thuggee, Frederick Lugard who conquered Northern Nigeria. If such men became proconsuls it often diminished rather than brightened their radiance. At that level, Imperial energy and Imperial virtue could not so easily appear to be ...”

“... subordination, and as ready to burn down a factory as to work in one. It is easy to see how the masters pined for a machine-like army, obedient, punctual, untainted by education, free from seditious rage, long-suffering, self-sacrificing, grateful for the lowest wage. But a factory was not a regiment. Ruskin is quoted as saying it was ‘easy to imagine an ...”

“... for Useful Knowledge – which, stunningly, had Benjamin Franklin, the Sanskrit scholar Sir William Jones and the agriculturalist Arthur Young among its corresponding members – that one-horse Kentish town boasted a humane society, assorted drinking and dining clubs, an agricultural society, concert and music societies, trapball and card societies, a ...”

“... civilised country’ had at their disposal better stuff than ‘many an African king, the absolute masters of the lives and liberties of ten thousand naked savages’. Civilisation itself consisted in the miracle of specialisation. Smith was far less interested in what the division of labour looked like in practice. His breezy lists of workmen elide the ...”

“... at 122. The old man was famous enough to be presented to the king, who ordered the royal physician William Harvey to perform an autopsy on him when he died in 1635. He was buried at Westminster Abbey and a poem was written about him by a forerunner of William McGonagall: He is a Wonder, worthy Admiration, He’s (in these ...”

“... answer the Wellsian position in vaguely Wellsian terms’, but this does not ring true. William Golding perhaps did that in Lord of the Flies (cp. Moreau), in The Inheritors (cp. ‘The Grisly Folk’), in ‘Envoy Extraordinary’ (cp. Wells’s Outline of History): but Lewis would deny every one of Wells’s fundamental propositions. What one ...”

“... numbers into the university’s pre-eminent academic college. Under a series of progressive masters, including Benjamin Jowett, Balliol adopted aspects of the new, relatively meritocratic and non-denominational culture of professionalism that was reshaping Victorian British elites, and encouraged many of its best students to take public exams in the ...”

“... aspect of sex. The process culminated in Havelock Ellis and Freud in the 19th century, and in Masters and Johnson and their imitators in the 20th. Foucault was a philosopher who knew little history, so he read scientific texts and paid scant attention to the enormous weight of evidence supporting the theory that a suffocating blanket of prudery had for ...”

“... in the Oxford Union. The man who in old age was to be both revered and mocked as the People’s William started out with the firm conviction that ‘the majority will be in the wrong.’ And the startling steps by which he found himself among the Liberals were interpreted by many of his associates not as a journey of honest discovery but as timeserving in ...”

“... and endured. Wolff sidestepped Postmodern elders such as John Barth, Robert Coover, Guy Davenport, William Gass, Harry Mathews, Paul Metcalf, Gilbert Sorrentino, Ronald Sukenick and Paul West, as well as their heirs, such as T. Coraghessan Boyle, Lydia Davis, Rick Moody, William Vollmann and David Foster Wallace. None of ...”

“... friends were fluent in a range of languages. They moved effortlessly between genres, and were masters of irony and allusion. They were also adept at self-fashioning, to the point of complete deception. High-minded, sorrowful and penetrating indictments of court corruption and the evils of politics were written by men who were prospering in political life ...”