“... out a scrupulous autopsy of the mechanical monk. Carved from poplar or beech, it has a hollow, bell-shaped body that contains its clockwork. Three wheels on the underside provide propulsion and steering while a pair of sandalled feet on the front paddle at the air to give the illusion of walking. The arms are articulated at the shoulder and elbow; the head ...”

“... most primitive fears of the white racist imagination were not held only by defenders of slavery. Henry A. Wise, a Southern member of Congress and a future Confederate general, called John Quincy Adams ‘the acutest, the astutest, the archest enemy of Southern slavery that ever existed’. Adams would have subscribed to the view that ‘all men are created ...”

“... two coasts at once. The summit of Goat Fell on the Isle of Arran can be seen in the west, and the Bell Rock, smack in the Firth of Forth, is clear on the other side, down to the east. Walking up to the burial mound, Karl and I were approached by a herd of cattle. ‘Good, good,’ said Seamus, coming up and flicking them away. ‘A square-go in ...”

“... ever. In the second half of her life, following her marriage in 1912 to the newspaper editor Henry de Jouvenel, the birth of her daughter, Bel-Gazou, and the beginning of her gradual transformation from scandalous cocotte into France’s most celebrated and respected woman writer, Colette moved on to a complicated series of Younger Women and Younger ...”

“... yours Respectfully                    S Walker A Scottish drunkard called Bell, who was involved in the divorce proceedings, told Mrs Hazlitt that ‘he had seen some passages’ of Sarah’s letters, ‘and they were such low vulgar milliner’s or servant wench’s sentimentality, that he wondered Mr Hazlitt could endure such ...”

“... into her bed, and stayed there for the next 22 years. One day​ in 1911, walking with Gertrude Bell, Arthur Benson mentioned to her that the composer Ethel Smyth had once said his mother was ‘as good as God and as clever as the Devil’. She laughed ‘at the profanity of it’, replying: ‘That’s one comfort about all of you – you are not in the ...”

“... was the first poet I fell in love with as a teenager. My English teacher (who preferred Pope and Henry James) mocked me for my taste, reminding me of Shelley’s description of Wordsworth in ‘Peter Bell the Third’ as ‘a solemn and unsexual man’. Never afraid of being thought either solemn or unsexual I ...”

“... a false narrative, a doorstep is smeared with shit, a dead cat is found hanging from the bell-pull, the words assassins and a mort are daubed on the shop’s blind. The police are only half-helpful: as one investigating officer says to another, ‘It smells of Kraut in here.’ The Krulls decide – not inaccurately – that Hans is the bringer, or ...”

“... the idea that beggary was in most cases the favoured trade of the impotent lush and thieving bawd. Henry VIII’s statute against vagrancy proclaimed that ‘vacabundes and Beggers have of longe tyme increased – dayly do increase’ and allowed that justices of the peace should provide the true poor with limited licences to beg; beggars begging outside these ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 power to ...”

“... told his early lover Pamela Hansford Johnson. ‘I’m like a baby in the dark,’ he explained to Henry Treece, an Apocalyptic poet who wrote the first critical book about him, and with whom Thomas had a long and revealing correspondence. Being infantile was useful as a would-be disarming way of acknowledging his worldly incompetence: ‘These apologies, we ...”

“... exactly in the little they said that Alma read the much that was there.’ The result is closer to Henry James than to Genet.Snyder makes no reference to Purdy’s close contemporary John Horne Burns, whose 1947 novel, The Gallery, had negotiated a sure-footed path through the competing claims of directness and prudence (it became a bestseller). The gallery is ...”

“... like all other Americans, no consciousness at all, you would be happier.’ In London, he tells Henry, he would have to ‘fight very hard, in order to survive’, but that would surely be better than having friends notable only for their ‘immaturity of feeling’. Mrs Eliot rather wickedly prints a letter to the poet from a distinguished and aged kinsman ...”