“... to have read more than a hundred books on ancient Carthage before even sitting down to write (Henry James had the sense while reading the novel that there were ‘libraries of books behind his most innocent sentences’). The novel’s air of erudition led a young curator in the Louvre’s Department of Antiquities, Wilhelm Fröhner, to question its ...”

“... immense and monotonous voice of huge billows ceaselessly breaking in an infinity of grey skies, green water and dazzling foam’. He was 38 and clearly needed to learn his new trade, and to pilot himself through the reefs of London publishing waters. Garnett was the very man to help, and to listen to complaints (‘one’s own personality is only a ...”

“... in awe of its own virtuosity, a response along the lines of Sydney Smith’s remark on an essay by Henry Brougham: ‘It is long and vigorous, like the penis of a jackass.’ And yet amazingly, and defiantly, beyond its hyper-consciously clever preface, the book picks itself up, dusts itself down, and seems to surprise even itself by getting on with the ...”

“... in Britain were not necessarily spurned in, say, India. The biggest manufacturer in Wednesfield, Henry Lane, rather gave the game away in an advertisement for pole traps after the 1904 ban was imposed: ‘NB. It is perhaps superfluous to mention that use of the above traps is now prohibited in the British Isles, but they are still largely used abroad, and ...”

“... creations of past ages had begun in the homes of rich collectors in the previous century. In 1896 Henry James described the way Mrs Gereth had furnished her house at Poynton, ‘written in great syllables of colour and form, the tongues of other countries and the hands of rare artists. It was all France and Italy, with their ages composed to rest.’ This ...”

“... Whirl up sea – Whirl your pointed pines, Splash your great pines On our rocks, Hurl your green over us, Cover us with your pools of fir. The sea poem had come a long way from ‘Casabianca’. As a historian, Carr is ecumenical: William Brooke Smith, a student who died of tuberculosis in 1908, is given as much consideration as Pound’s other early ...”

“... her friendships with men whose thinking was to direct her work – principally the idealistic J.R. Green, with his aspiration to regenerate London’s East End, and the humanist T.H. Green, who with Jowett was making Balliol the most sceptical and dynamic college in Oxford. Against all expectations, the university was ...”

“... dark, from a Hackney-coach’. Motte fretted about several details, including the blue, red and green ribbons for which Lilliputian ministers compete by dancing on ropes. In the published text, he changed the colours to purple, yellow and white; blue, red and green were the colours, respectively, of the Orders of the ...”

“... author becomes culturally effective, and the translator a “noble collateral” with him.’ Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, relied heavily on Douglas’s Eneados when he translated Books Two and Four of Virgil’s epic into English. Surrey rejected Douglas’s use of rhyming couplets and drew on Italian verso sciolto to create the earliest form of blank ...”

“... never spied at all. In 1938, a disappointingly low-level Russian calling himself ‘Michael Green’ appeared in Washington and acquired from Straight a few mildly private memoranda on general themes prepared for the State Department. Straight also handed over some essays in which he suggested to Stalin that his foreign policy was destructive and ...”

“... John Wayne Gacy was one of many serial killers and mass murderers infatuated with John Wayne. Henry Kissinger is another. ‘I’ve always acted alone,’ he has said. ‘Americans admire that enormously. Americans admire the cowboy ... entering the village or city alone on his horse ... A Wild West tale, if you like.’ Pat Buchanan, too, has tried to ...”

“... with many surviving stretches of medieval tiled floor, but much the most numinous object is a green earthenware inkwell found in the chapterhouse during excavations and now in the abbey museum; it was presumably used, possibly for the last time, to sign the deed of surrender handing the abbey over to Henry VIII’s ...”

“... Brooke in profile (‘your favourite actress’, some of his friends labelled it). He was, Henry James wrote, ‘in an extraordinary degree … a creature on whom the gods had smiled their brightest’ (James had fallen hard for what Brooke called ‘his fresh, boyish stunt’).In 1918 his Collected Poems were finally published, together with a memoir ...”

“... the ‘coast of Bohemia’ – secures the play as a (kind of) comedy.These are all versions of ‘green world’ plays, in which, as Northrop Frye pointed out in the 1950s, ‘the action of the comedy begins in a world represented as a real world, moves into a green world, goes into a metamorphosis there in which the comic ...”

“... only to claim his dead father’s estate and to purge the court of Richard’s favourites, Bushy, Green and Bagot, whom he describes as ‘The caterpillars of the commonwealth,/Which I have sworn to weed and pluck away’. Once he has summarily executed Bushy and Green, however, it is clear that his only option, if he ...”