“... These Promenades come from a man who, although he is the most hexagonal* historian in the United Kingdom, is still not recognised at his true worth south of the Channel. Right from the start of his itinerary Cobb gaily mixes everything together. He paints well-behaved Norman children such as one can only dream of meeting these days. He rides his biography backwards, he describes his period as a pion (a supervisor) in boarding-schools run either by priests or by anti-clericals, both of whom were great believers in corporal punishment ...”

“... random. What is important, as Claudius leaves the court, is that the king, like some character in Henry James, now knows that Hamlet knows, and is armed. Perhaps more in need of notice are one or two elements that interfuse with dramaturgy, in the extraordinary brilliance of the work’s verbal style. The first occurs late in the play’s second ...”

“... to 1909, has not exactly been neglected, but Nathan Miller’s 1992 biography was the first since Henry Pringle’s in 1931. Edmund Morris won a Pulitzer Prize in 1980 for The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, a bestseller despite its 863 pages, and now he gives us the Presidential years in a svelte, eminently readable 772 pages. Some critics (mostly ...”

“... for moving a plot briskly on. Howell examines the presence of malaria in the work of Dickens and Henry James, concentrating on Martin Chuzzlewit (1844) and Daisy Miller (1878). Both books were written before Ronald Ross proved, in 1897, that the malaria parasite was transmitted by the female mosquito’s bite rather than by miasma; each depicts the ...”

“... photograph of Twombly in Rome, standing by the hand of the colossus of Constantine. In 1778, Henry Fuseli drew himself crestfallen, seated by the foot and hand of the colossus, and called it ‘The artist moved to despair at the grandeur of antique fragments’. His figure – lightly sketched – is almost invisible beside the giant remnants of the ...”

“... fashionable daytime assignation. And he repeatedly advised his friend the journalist-politician Henry Labouchère, whose exposés in his weekly paper Truth embroiled him in as many libel suits as Private Eye. Lewis’s practice reflected the changing coloration of British crime. If none of the activities attributed to his clients was really new, some ...”

“... Cervantes? And yet there is a kind of dishevelled newness about them, as there is about La vie de Henry Brulard, Stendhal’s quasi-autobiography, which many consider his best work. But the great drawback of his technique, or lack of it, is precisely its unfinished and unfinishable quality. Nothing happens, nothing stops, nothing – artistically speaking ...”

“... 1486, eight months after Richard III’s death at the Battle of Bosworth, the ‘Lancastrian’ Henry VII set out with all the usual pomp and pageantry on a progress through his new kingdom. Before visiting York, Richard’s northern stronghold, Henry sent instructions ahead telling the citizens how he was to be ...”

“... relatively unsophisticated architect’s assistant, a new arrival in London from the country; and Henry Knight, an established, opinionated lawyer deeply at home in literary London (he also reviews books). Hardy’s fiction repeatedly stages not only the multiple courting of a heroine (Jude the Obscure switches genders and agency), but the tense sociology of ...”

“... stories. Cather’s first novel, Alexander’s Bridge, was in the manner of her admired Henry James, but it did not please her, nor did it make any mark in the world of fiction. (Her earlier book of poetry, notable in no way, had been self-published.) At college and afterwards, she had written stories about pioneer life, but she saw no special ...”

“... self’. Later autobiographers drew on other models, customised in more or less knowing ways. John Henry Newman regretted ‘being obliged to adopt the language of books’ when describing his experience of evangelical conversion, as his feelings at the time ‘were so different from any account I have ever read’. Yet the conversion narrative as it emerged ...”

“... Hudson in the early years of the century, and, a generation later, counsellor to the 24-year-old Henry Green, who rewrote Blindness in accordance with Garnett’s advice, and many years later attributed to his adviser ‘almost any original idea’ he had gained about how to write novels. Yet it would be misleading to think of Garnett as the natural champion ...”

“... the memory of one’s spouse that gives adultery its dirty kick? (In a poem called ‘Adultery’, James Dickey, who knew whereof he spoke, concluded: ‘Guilt is magical.’) Why are ‘peccadillos’ deemed part of the devil’s handiwork? (Most peccadillos are as harmless as hobbies.) Is a belt easier to swipe than, say, a pair of cashmere socks or a bottle ...”

“... who said horrible things about the plebeian Joyce, and about the girls who worked at Woolworths; James Kelman acted like a barbarian at the Booker dinner, and so on. Most of these commentators imagine themselves to be writing a form of intellectual history when they are only pouring gossip into fancy goblets at London book parties. They experience apparently ...”

“... does, somewhere between literary respectability and bestsellerdom: John O’Hara, Nelson Algren, James Jones, John Hersey. Parini declares in a fighting Afterword that answers to the Steinbeck question ‘spring to mind’. Clearly the answer which springs highest and most persistently is intellectual snobbery. Steinbeck’s low status is ascribed to the ...”