“... Hampden, and is duly enchanted. ‘The sun was rising over mountains, and birches, and impossibly green meadows ... it was like a country from a dream.’ Richard wants to major in Classics, but he is told that the subject is in the hands of one professor, Julian Morrow, who has only five students. He decides to seek out Morrow, and the writing excitedly ...”

“... the bedroom in which she poses. It’s eerie without being contrived, like a scene from a novel by Henry Green. Brandt’s formal attitude here is well matched by the cold intimacy of Freud’s portraits of Kitty Garman and Caroline Blackwood. But in other respects these crisp early Freuds seem the antithesis of the postwar style. Girl in a ...”

“... flights of fancy become tedious, I slowly walk up the path that leads to the mountain. The pale green trees undulate as a single mass, their flowers a riot of unbelievably beautiful colours.By contrast, the woman prefers to walk around Seoul at night, among shadows and LED lights, passing dive bars and canals, crossing rubbish-strewn underpasses and ...”

“... ways her genius as a publisher continued to lie in publicity and marketing – the recognisable green livery of the Virago Modern Classics showed her sense of aesthetics as well as her commercial acumen. To establish the new publishing house for writing by women, she drew together a band of collaborators: Harriet Spicer, Ruthie Petrie, Ursula Owen ...”

“... Luto means ‘mourning’, but also gestures to Shakespeare and Fletcher’s song from Henry VIII: ‘Orpheus with his lute made trees/…/Bow themselves when he did sing.’ Such poems allow patterns of pattern-making to overlap and inform one another, from butchers’ precision to woodcuts to singing to scribal practice. ‘My father’s cuts ...”

“... of brilliance’, as the Slade’s inspiring and famously bad-tempered drawing master, Henry Tonks, called it – caught the moment when the academic rigour of the life class was beginning to be infused with stirrings of the new. Carrington entered the school in the year of Fry’s exhibition, around the same time as Gertler, Nevinson and the Nash ...”

“... greatness and purpose, through the values elicited from the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales and Henry IV Part One, Keats’s Odes and Tom Jones, Emma and Tess. It is still happening, even after we have got historians to stop drilling them in the battles we won, and when geographers no longer offer them maps in which the Empire is coloured red. Penguin ...”

“... on time I don’t linger to admire the scenery. Every time I go past the fountain, near where Henry Royce’s statue used to stand, I mutter and tick away to myself: ‘Fkin bastids fkin bastids fkin bastids’. I saw that on a wall once and it seems to express something inchoate and furious. The Council came and took away the statue, which had always ...”

“... So, too, the elaborate parallels and contrasts: Robert Walpole and Bolingbroke, Walpole and Henry Pelham, and, pervasively, Pitt against Newcastle. Behind this lies an ancient literary decorum: when Brooke observes, ‘Walpole’s correspondence is a record of his friendships; his memoirs and journals, of his hatreds,’ he points to the Ciceronian ...”

“... of animation on everything the poet saw and put into words. In a sense it was much the same for Henry James, that other great equivocator of the American literary scene, and always a great admirer of Whitman. James’s prose, even the late prose, is paradoxically as physical as Leaves of Grass, and in the same way. A kind of sublimation was involved in both ...”

“... and she was determined to keep her identity hidden, if not from London circles (her brother Henry couldn’t resist boasting), then at least from the circles she moved in. Propriety was a factor, of course, but she doesn’t appear to have been constrained by it. Her letters show that the money was useful and the success of the books ...”

“... the money that might have been spent on the Harvard education he declined. Guatemala led to Dark Green, Bright Red (1950), a novel about the way the US and the United Fruit Company went about furthering their interests in Central America. Vidal was quick to notice the consequences of the Cold War in the US, and the conformity he thought it inspired. Like ...”

“... John and his sister Gwen. They had come to London to study under the irascible but inspiring Henry Tonks and soon attracted a group of talented students around them. ‘Those Johns you know have a hold that never ceases,’ Ida wrote to a friend. She stayed for six years, working hard to be an artist and making friendships that lasted all her life. Among ...”

“... and stylised antinomies. Among the most familiar are Aristotle’s nature and convention, Sir Henry Maine’s status and contract, Tönnies’s Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, Michael Oakeshott’s ‘Societas’ and ‘Universitas’, Durkheim’s ‘mechanical’ and ‘organic’ solidarity, and Hobbesian vertical ‘command’ models of authority ...”

“... accepted a new job in Louisville, and so he rushed her off to Jersey City (the nearest Gretna Green). Needless to say, Crippen spent only a few months in Kentucky before he found a job in Missouri, and then, shortly after that, returned to New York. He’d ditched so many jobs by now that he was finding it hard to get another; instead, he was writing and ...”