“... Henry Luce​ – who coined the catchphrase about ‘the American Century’ – once said that the crucial event of that century would be the Christianisation of China. He meant the Protestant evangelisation of China; it would have been no less absurd to propose the conversion of the Chinese to Judaism, but there was a time when millions of American homes gave little subscriptions for the cause, and when the prestige of the American missionary stood high ...”

“... words he can tell his tale judiciously but yet quickly. The long training will have given him the power; – the freshness will give him the life. Changes after that will so often destroy the life! The author himself pondering over his own sentence, will desire polish – and still more polish – But the reader coming after him, and dashing over his ...”

“... was in consequence able to describe the trial as ‘one of the most significant tributes that power has ever paid to reason’, and the British prosecutor, Sir Hartley Shawcross, to say without blushing: ‘There are those who would perhaps say that these wretched men should have been dealt with summarily without trial . . . But that was not the view of ...”

“... finished, a bit-player on an international stage dominated by its old enemies, Britain and France. Henry Kamen’s ambition is to show that this historical picture is essentially false. According to him, Spain did not make the Spanish Empire, the Empire made Spain. Furthermore, it was not a single coherent organism dependent for its existence on Castile, as ...”

“... highways; the border with the Dominican Republic was closed. The unelected prime minister, Ariel Henry, in post since the assassination of Jovenel Moïse in 2021, was in Kenya, where he had flown a few days earlier to negotiate the deployment of a ‘multinational security support force’. No one wanted him back. Even the president of the Dominican Republic ...”

“... like wages and class struggles. They are so sordid!’The cartoon, reproduced in Edith Hall and Henry Stead’s People’s History of Classics, encapsulates several elements of the debate about classical education at the turn of the 20th century. In Classics Transformed: Schools, Universities and Society in England, 1830-1960, published in 1998, Christopher ...”

“... in German youth. Whatever the effect on German youth, it is clear that such soaps have the power to scrub away distinctions between fact and fantasy. Until recently it was possible to visit South-fork ranch and for $4 a square inch – or $25 a square foot – purchase a title deed complete with oil rights. Other spin-offs include the scent Forever ...”

“... As Henry James never tired of noting, the real thing turns up rarely, in unpredictable places and unexpected guises. I have now encountered it and, marvellous to relate, stamped on it are the words most redolent of the cheap and gimcrack, ‘Made in Taiwan’. Just north of Taipei is the National Palace Museum of the Republic of China, as Taiwan officially calls itself, one of the four great museums of the world ...”

“... Days that follow, Fabrizio is determined to strike a blow for his idol, now giddily restored to power. He sets out for France and for a series of picaresque adventures, culminating in the Battle of Waterloo. But was he really at the Battle of Waterloo? He can never afterwards quite decide. Certainly there were deep trenches full of water, and he found ...”

“... of self were inventions of the 20th century. In his snatch of vérité during the film Reds, Henry Miller hazarded the view that people have always done a lot of fucking. Montaigne settled to his solitary task of reflective self-examination in the mid-16th century. Sex and the self as subjects for investigation share the characteristic of always making ...”

“... out his loft apartment at 143 Prince Street when he received an unexpected visitor. This was Henry Geldzahler, curator of modern art at the Metropolitan Museum. Hughes, probably the most macho and combative critic in his profession, was, by his own account, sweaty, foul-tempered, sore-footed and ‘grey with ingrained dirt’. Geldzahler, a ‘happily ...”

“... in the service of his king. We find him not only voicing but defending before Parliament Henry VIII’s justification for renouncing his first marriage, suppressing his own opinion. When asked, he replied only that ‘several times he had declared his thoughts on it to the king.’Yet alongside these less than admirable aspects, a picture emerges of ...”

“... have taken place almost uninterruptedly for a century and more. For the imperial Britain in which Henry Wood’s Proms began in the summer of 1895 was a very different place from the post-imperial Britain in which the BBC Proms have been performed in the summer of 2007, and this in turn helps explain why the Proms, like other regularly repeated rituals, have ...”

“... when Crane was only 23, is short and centres on the battlefield experience of a man younger still, Henry Fleming, who worries that in the test of war he will prove a coward, and then does. Some rough germ of an idea for the novel had been with Crane for years. As a child he fantasised about war and in his teens he contemplated West Point and a military ...”

“... the life. It tells the story of her great unreciprocated passion for another undergraduate, ‘Henry’, in the form of a long-enduring tenderness felt by a 50-year-old maiden lady for a married and unlovable Archdeacon. The very ability so to rework her own situation suggests a remarkable detachment, humour and originality: all in all, a literary ...”