“... wife and three children, arranged in perfect descending height order from left to right, husband Henry to little Bobby. The shot is framed by two trees; in the upper right corner, a group of smiling shoppers coming through the lot balances the family in the lower left. Tall, masculine Henry is exquisite in camel-hair ...”

“... tireless explainers and theorisers. For example: ‘If the Canadians had the military and economic power, might they not have had an equal right to save their southern neighbours from two European world wars on the grounds that an American minority, armed with great wealth, could so subjugate the American political process as to oblige the many to go glumly to ...”

“... philosophy was its fundamental irrelevance to the main task of acquiring – or re-acquiring – power. The heady idealism that characterised a great deal of 18th and 19th-century political thought, in Britain and Europe, was itself an index of the distance between such thought (and such thinkers) and the centres of political control. In the gap between ...”

“... the poet’s 400th birthday in 1964, ‘patient’: he endures because his writing has ‘power to absorb our questions’ and has shown an extraordinary ability to adapt itself to the concerns of each age. But as well as being patient he is also volatile (and it may be that the volatility of Shakespeare’s language is the chief reason for his ...”

“... makes possible. For instance, he fully supports the Prince’s view that in allowing his brother Henry to become a cardinal his father had betrayed both him and the Stuart cause. A more important historical contribution is McLynn’s unsentimental analysis of the actions of the Jacobite clans. In many cases, the manpower of the clan joined the Forty-Five but ...”

“... old girlfriend, or rather an old lust, since this is how the women are chiefly celebrated – what Henry Bech, in the story ‘His Oeuvre’, remembers as ‘the most marvellous lay of his life’. Bech’s crudity is not just his own, unfortunately. Of course, the prose trusses things in very pretty ribbons, but the hard, coarse, primitive, misogynistic ...”

“... career.’ Third, the committee would be composed of experts and critics. It would put too much power in their hands: ‘Why should a collector have to ask Mr MacColl if Mr Steer is a good painter?’ (MacColl was on the staff of the Tate.) The Turner Prize is just one piece of evidence that Sickert had a shrewd sense of where things might be heading. There ...”

“... Reference works give her date of birth as 1899, the year in which it was registered by her father Henry, who, absent-minded and impractical though he was, must surely have noticed her existence earlier. A bank clerk, he lived with his daughter until his death, becoming, when widowed, a grouchy bore. The family was dominated by her mother, Rose, an amateur ...”

“... is kept from wreaking havoc by a spell of bondage only Titania can break. The mortals – Molly, Henry and Will – are recovering from losses (a boyfriend’s suicide for Molly; a cruel break-up for Henry; a fateful sexual indiscretion for Will) which they hope the party will salve. But they never make ...”

“... Aron were more formidable thinkers – Schlesinger had a particularly intimate relationship with power. But one of the fascinating paradoxes of Richard Aldous’s biography is how slight Schlesinger’s influence in Washington actually was, despite his own pride in it, when compared to his influence on the American reading public, which he counted for ...”

“... the Rockingham Whigs, which defined itself primarily through its objection to untrammelled royal power. He firmly believed that Fox would be an asset to the party: ‘You are better able to serve them than any man I know.’ Moreover, he continued, you will certainly want some better support than merely that of the Crown. For I much doubt, whether, with ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Bible in Kipling, it is omnipresent in traditional socialism. It is always hard to recapture the power of a recently dead myth. But, in this country certainly, many socialists believed at heart, as Bellamy did, that the state could do everything best. The opponents of Labour’s would-be Dynamic Duo still think this. So do the enemies waiting for ...”

“... England was, in the memorable phrase of Sellar and Yeatman, ‘Top Nation’: both an imperial power and the first industrial nation. Sellar and Yeatman’s comic masterpiece 1066 and All That (1930) poked fun at England’s not quite nationalism. But if it’s not nationalism, how should we describe England’s distinctive sense of self? Probably the most ...”

“... The distinction he is secretly making throughout the book becomes explicit in his essay on Henry Green: Some very fine artists impose themselves, but Henry Green belonged to those who masochistically seek to let their characters speak through them. In so speaking, they may expose more than they know; but don’t we ...”