“... Washington, and in France were shared by Paris, Versailles, Lyons, Marseilles and Bordeaux. So, as Henry James explained, ‘one has not the alternative of speaking of London as a whole, for the simple reason that there is no whole of it ... Rather, it is a collection of many wholes, and of which of them is one to speak?’ Which, indeed? One matter which ...”

“... Kerry with Tits’: five syllables full of implications for the politics of gender, power and anxiety in America. In Jane Fonda’s War Mary Hershberger does a good job of describing how this state of affairs came about. The story begins with an apolitical young woman whose anti-Communist convictions were so conventional that in 1959 she ...”

“... A Grand Old Junky. An aroma of Establishment dignity now attaches to him. In the early Sixties, Henry Brooke, the Home Secretary, saw fit to deny him a visa to stay in Britain. He was undesirable. The TLS did all in its power to keep Naked Lunch from publication, proscribing it as ‘vomit’. Nevertheless, helped by a ...”

“... on to the printers) the distinction can’t be quite so clear. There’s talk in these essays of Henry James dictating to Mary Weld (she records that it took 194 days to dictate The Wings of the Dove but makes no mention of content or quality) and of Erle Stanley Gardner’s fiction factory, with his suite of Della Streets banging out the latest Perry Mason ...”

“... to him. Worse, most of his correspondents were obscure and insignificant. Between the letter from Henry Oldenburg, soon to be secretary of the Royal Society, in 1655 and Leibniz’s of 1670, the only letters between Hobbes and an intellectual of the first rank are two scathing reports transmitted through intermediaries by Christian Huygens. In them he ...”

“... been six months in London before the Times had devoted a leader to his work. In that year, 1890, Henry James had termed him ‘the star of the hour’; R.L. Stevenson had pronounced him ‘too clever to live’; and Tennyson had judged him ‘the only one ... with the divine fire’. Nine years later, news of his illness had taken precedence in London over ...”

“... in another. In Olive, Again, Kitteridge has retired and her forbearing pharmacist husband, Henry, is dead; the book opens with another bereaved spouse, Jack Kennison, whom we met in the last chapter of Olive Kitteridge. Jack and Olive, both prickly and intolerant, are warily finding their way towards mutual consolation.The setting of Strout’s work is ...”

“... to turn against a view of Shakespeare as a poet who transcends his age.’ In 1599, Shapiro reads Henry V, Julius Caesar, As You Like It and Hamlet as texts written solely to ‘show … the very age and body of the time his form and pressure’. He cites this remark of Prince Hamlet’s as evidence that ‘Shakespeare certainly thought of his art in this ...”

“... what seems a known and friendly colleague, to take, out of turn, the upper hand, the stance of power – to give the order (since the challenge is like all such questions an order). Slight as it is, this opening fracas sets the tone for the whole play. Barnardo, however minor a character, has attempted to take ...”

“... scholars habitually refer to Pericles, The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline, The Tempest, All Is True (Henry VIII) and The Two Noble Kinsmen, all composed between about 1607 and 1613 – between Shakespeare’s 43rd year and his 49th – compound the issue of genre with questions of biography. Given the fates that overtook his colleagues Christopher Marlowe and ...”

“... out of their possessions. ‘You do wisely … when in a Crowd, to amuse the Mob by Quarrels,’ Henry Fielding’s master-criminal Jonathan Wild advises his gang, ‘that while they are listening to your Jargon, you may with the greater Ease and Safety, pick their Pockets.’ In The Beggar’s Opera (1728), Peachum, a thief-catcher, surveys with Lockit the ...”

“... in ours; and certainly not Thomas More. He is seen as a Catholic martyr because he died opposing Henry VIII’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon and the King’s robbery from the Pope of the leadership of the English Church. But he is also seen as a lawyer-layman caught in the mesh of presumptuous ecclesiology, an English Cicero of the pre-Reformation who ...”

“... dishonest frenzy’, ‘reckless booming anarchy’. For all that, the concentration of wealth and power was alarming. In 1912, officials from five New York banks – J.P. Morgan and Co, National City, the First National, Bankers Trust and Guaranty Trust – held 341 directorships in 112 US companies, including other banks, public utilities, and companies ...”

“... In November 1894 Henry James set down in his notebooks an outline for the novel that, eight years later, became The Wings of the Dove. He wrote about a heroine who was dying but in love with life. ‘She is equally pathetic in her doom and in her horror of it. If she only could live just a little; just a little more – just a little longer ...”

“... life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.’ His determined emphasis on the power of the individual to shape their own health by continual effort and appropriate habits, Kaag and van Belle suggest, makes James as relevant as ever to ‘our students’, since this strain of American self-reliance ‘resonates with what they have been ...”