“... developed over many generations the notion of the ‘trust’, which among other things enabled small groups of people to carry out any lawful business without specific concession from the state, and without raising thorny questions about whether they thus transformed themselves into living corporations with distinct legal personalities. The heart of ...”

“... seems that he did not. Gissing would have been gratified by this culmination to a continuous, if small-scale industry of studies, biographies, selections of letters and diaries, and bibliographies. He never abandoned the belief that he and his work deserved such attention, but gloom always won out over anticipation. Oddly, I think, these editors insist that ...”

“... New Englander, twenty years younger than himself. Their family consisted of three girls – Helen, the indulged Rosamond, Beatrix – and, at long last, the boy John. Their children’s talents must have been partly, at least, inherited, but no trace of their father Rude’s jolly German Kameradschaft seems to have been passed on. Adrian Wright has been ...”

“... was something she too enjoyed. Pretending to be someone or something else, preferably a small fluffy animal or a character from The Wind in the Willows, suited her well. Speaking in her own voice never got her as far. She married John Moore in 1885 in her father’s church and settled down in a Boston suburb where Moore thought he had ...”

“... Salisbury’.) Like his previous attempt at mixing 100 per cent proof world history with the small beer of English fiction (The Decline of the West, a title to rank with Mel Brooks’s History of the World, Part II), News from Nowhere is a crashing failure. But it’s a monumental failure, a Spruce Goose or Centre Point of novels that will stand as ...”

“... of ruling Carthage after the departure of Aeneas. ‘Niobe and Hecuba weep through eternity and Helen is always young.’ Here Dr French touches on an area of real interest for criticism, not least because Shakespeare himself is the great exception to the point she is making. One of the most significant things about the elaborate portraits of women in 18th ...”

“... response, made in the details of thought and speech by people in everyday life, to the large and small miseries of living. Before his understanding with Aunt Julia gets properly established, the narrator unburdens himself to the scriptwriter.‘I’ve got love troubles, my friend Camacho,’ I said to him straight out, surprised at hearing myself use a soap ...”

“... by so prominent an amateur as Lady Diana Beauclerk, or by as highly esteemed a professional as Helen Allingham. The implicit assignment of women’s art to a devalued realm of domestic handicraft goes hand in hand with an unprecedented attempt to insist on the serious intellectual character of all significant watercolour practice; indeed, at one point the ...”

“... the course. George is very likable. He is poorly educated but keen enough to learn. His daughter, Helen, had been an art student, and George had tried to keep up: ‘I even went to art galleries, and looked – and yawned. I even mugged up on her favourite painter, Caravaggio (they all looked like waxworks to me). And found out he was a bit of a tearaway ...”

“... Here’s how his friendship with Paul Ivano, a consumptive photographer, began: Princess Helen Troubetzkoy knocked at the bungalow door of a friend, Paul Ivano, at two in the morning to ask if Rudy could be put up in his spare room. Ivano agreed, delighted to learn that his uninvited guest spoke French. They went horseback riding in the morning and ...”

“... penance and imitation of Christ in his Passion, especially in the very lands where he suffered.Helen Nicholson’s project in Women and the Crusades is to consider all dimensions of women’s participation, both on campaign and on the home front. She casts a very broad net. Like other recent historians, Nicholson redefines crusading to denote ‘any ...”

“... and authors approaching fifty at the start of the decade or only lately past it, grew up in small provincial towns, emigrated to New York in the Jazz Age and worked together in the city rooms of the Herald Tribune and the New York World. Unlike their successors, writers who came of age in the Depression, or World War Two, or, like Sayre herself, in the ...”

“... expedition: ‘Drop your drift net into the ocean and you pull up all sorts of fish, big and small, and you hope someone’s going to drop the small fish back in before it’s too late but you can never be sure that’s going to happen.’ As well as small fry like Conteh, the law ...”

“... other, a thatch’d house, a round pavilion on a mount, [and] Shake Spear’s house, in which is a small statue of him, and his works in a glass case; and in all the houses and seats are books in hanging glass cases. Kirk established that ‘Shake Spear’s house’ – where presumably the countess and fellow members of the Shakespeare Ladies Club sat at the ...”

“... and to our evolutionary past. Aware of this, and acknowledging that, as the dictionary says, ‘a small percentage of the population appear to have such vivid imaginations that they can find it hard to distinguish between reality and illusion,’ should the rationalist who is confronted by alternative explanations for the world be steaming mad, mildly ...”