“... I am convinced,’ wrote Henry Church to the poet who had just dedicated to him his longest poem, ‘Notes toward a Supreme Fiction’, ‘that Mrs Stevens has had an important part to play in the poetry of Wallace Stevens.’ This was in 1943, by which time Mr and Mrs Stevens had been living together in marital discord for more than a third of a century ...”

“... one of his mottoes: ‘Hay hay the wythe swan/by godes soule I am thy man.’ Troupes of wodewose (green men) were arranged around him in a pageant, complete with virgins, elephants and bats – a spectacle of sovereign marvels. Another of Edward’s mottoes was ‘it is as it is.’ He loved to play pretend. Sometimes he dressed as a commoner and mingled with ...”

“... Colette neglected her only daughter, born in 1913, when she was married to her second husband, Henry de Jouvenel, though she had plenty of time for Henry’s son from his first marriage, Bertrand, whom she seduced in 1920, when he was sixteen.Is Gigi the reason English-speaking readers don’t much bother with ...”

“... realisation that it is the very impossibility of her youthful emotion that makes it so intense. Henry James could have imagined the scene with a similar sympathy, yet he could never have brought himself to ‘do’ it in a novel. The quiet contrast between the onion-eating young man who makes the sisters giggle and the romantic would-be scholar who has ...”

“... but the ‘way out of the impasse’ that was ‘available to Wilson’. (The Wilson concerned is Henry. To find out his dates, 1863-1934, I had to turn to a good book, Alastair Service’s Edwardian Architecture.) But there’s no guessing whether it was the past or evidence from it that science excavated, let alone whether Mr Harbison supposes ...”

“... insults are to be gleaned from Wintle and Kenin’s Dictionary of Biographical Quotation: Henry Channon called him ‘that old pink petulant walrus’; Gertrude Stein compared him to ‘a very prosperous Mellon’s Food baby’; and Oscar Wilde found his face ‘vague, formless, obscene’. So it is a comfort to find all these cruelties belied in the ...”

“... and civic libraries emerged after the traumatic dispersal of monastic libraries under Henry VIII: the Bodleian opened in 1602; Sion College was founded in 1630 for Anglican clergy; Humphrey Chetham’s public library in Manchester, which still bears his name, opened in 1653; and there were new town libraries in Ipswich (1599), Norwich (1608) and ...”

“... on with great resistance in the mortuary and religious marketplaces. Bishops and dismal traders, green-burialists and estate agents were among the most vocal naysayers. Law and order sorts worried that foul play might go for ever undetected if corpses were cremated. Parsons quotes a sermon given by the Bishop of Lincoln in Westminster Abbey on 5 July ...”

“... on 18 September 1905, into a family of storytellers and intellectuals. Her paternal grandfather, Henry de Mille, was an Episcopal minister who became a playwright, one of the theatre producer David Belasco’s first collaborators. He discouraged his sons William and Cecil from going into the theatre but they didn’t listen. William de Mille, Agnes’s ...”

“... judging, doing something verboten. As a cure for a nervous breakdown, if you can’t afford ‘a Henry James one’, she prescribes shocking the seller at Tiffany by ordering garishly coloured notepaper.Of course, what I ought to have gotten was ‘Ecru-White Kid’ with black engraving or, at worst, dark green or brown ...”

“... be said. Sculpture in England is a special case. I shall put it aside, essentially, till I come to Henry Moore, whose room in the Tate exhibition is far and away the strongest. But simply this, for the present: sculpture had the advantage, it seems to me, if our subject is metropolitan taste, of being always a less mannerly, more laborious art. It was a ...”

“... enabled him to give you any reason at all.’ There were a few clever commanders, such as Henry Brackenbury, who found himself in charge of the River Column in February 1885 when General Earle was shot through the head, but the soldiers distrusted him as ‘bureaucratic’ and ‘scholastic’. The men had ample opportunity for combat at its most ...”

“... Rise, the first volume, came out in 1939, followed by Over to Candleford in 1941 and Candleford Green in 1943. She wanted them to be published as fiction, which OUP didn’t do; her editor labelled them ‘autobiography’ instead. This proved frustrating for historians – it turned out that some of her facts were invented and characters conflated – and ...”

“... opened the way for that celebrated trio of the late 19th century, Crane, Caldecott and Kate Green-away – vigorous, sportive and quaint respectively. Whalley and Chester note the influence of the Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic movements on these and other styles of illustration, and show how Caldecott, in particular, affected later water-colourists like ...”

“... fact, Hanta himself is paper, pâpier-maché compacted from beer and old books and mouse nests and green and blue and metallic and ‘cobalt-coloured’ flesh flies (courtesy of wodges of kindly donated butchers’ paper), a palimpsest, a cento, a mummy, a dummy, putting his best (or is it his worst?) side forward. Materials – thoughts – come to mind and ...”