“... intimidation. The Times described him as ‘a remarkably well-built man, of extraordinary muscular power, and exceedingly active’. ‘His countenance exhibits in a way not to be mistaken unflinching determination of character, strong powers of perception, and that bluffness which denotes animal courage.’ It was a well-judged review. The reporter from the ...”

“... Hester Salusbury married first the wealthy brewer, MP, womaniser and ‘Southwark macaroni’ Henry Thrale, with whom she had 12 children, only four of whom survived, and then the Italian music master Gabriel Piozzi, for whom she pined passionately at the ripe old age of 40, and scandalised her circle by not only marrying but happily introducing him into ...”

“... to swan. He can’t help perceiving ‘in a grand and careless way’ that the thoroughly eligible Henry Crawford – rich, elegant, every inch a gentleman – is showing a special interest in her, ‘nor perhaps refrain (though unconsciously) from giving a more willing assent to invitations on that account’. What does ‘unconsciously’ mean here? Sir ...”

“... its own terms, the relation to it of anyone fully awake to its deceptions and to its stultifying power could be only negative, tragic in one way or another. The developed moral sense of his elect makes them aliens in their own world. Its life is the only one they know, and they cannot live it. In the fiction, this can seem an artificial tragedy – a ...”

“... from the age of 14), given to sudden embraces, and (it seems to have been noticed, and not only by Henry James) rather loud at parties. The functions of biography are many. Lionel Trilling, in a masterpiece of the 1930s, wrote of Arnold’s intellectual journeys and about only so much of his actual life as was necessary to understand them. There are good ...”

“... right-hand men. Among these lords were the Robertians, later known as the Capetians, whose power centred on Paris. Others included the counts of Flanders, Vermandois and Poitou, and the dukes of Aquitaine, Anjou, Burgundy and Normandy. All these families were connected by ties of marriage and bound by oaths of loyalty to the king, and their territories ...”

“... was always an impatience, a sense of insufficiency, haunting the Aesthetic Movement from within. Henry James coming out of the Grosvenor Gallery in 1877 (before Ruskin’s ‘pot of paint’ had set the lines of battle): ‘It may be a narrow point of view, but to be interesting it seems to me that a picture should have some relation to life as well as to ...”

“... How were they different? Though colonists were well aware of the connection between white skin and power it was not until 1910 that W.E.B. Du Bois published his essay ‘The Souls of White Folk’ and identified ‘personal whiteness’ as a key aspect of racialised entitlement, a collective fantasy of ‘the ownership of the earth, forever and ...”

“... to deal with the American writer’s life through the alter ego of unprolific Jewish novelist Henry Bech, here attending a party: Like a fuzzy sock being ejected by the tumble drier there was flung towards Bech the shapeless face of Vernon Klegg, the American Kafka, whose austere minimalist renderings of kitchen spats and dishevelled mobile homes were ...”

“... he ought to have been a Guardian, shaping the Empire, or dominating Cabinets, or, at worst, ‘a power behind the throne’. However, after his spell in Milner’s ‘Kindergarten’, the nation didn’t seem to want him in the Guardian line, so he did the next best thing and became an entertainer. And with what success! There were, above all, his own ...”

“... the British Foreign Office claimed that it based its policy on the maintenance of the Balance of Power, and that Britain, remaining aloof from European entanglements, could use her influence to preserve that balance and to prevent any other European power from disturbing it. In the 1980s, the foreign policy of every ...”

“... Short Cuts, 20 November), I hurried down to the London Review Bookshop to pick up a copy of Henry Green’s Loving. The recent (2000) Vintage Classics edition seemed as good a bet as any: it has a nice picture of a peacock swanking on the cover, and costs only £6.99. Loving, first published in 1945, is concerned with the lives of the servants in an ...”

“... to be, as a novelist and critic of societies, the most important import since Joseph Conrad and Henry James. Not least because he so extraordinarily combines their traditions, right down to following James in this book to where T.S. Eliot was mildly shocked to find him, seeking spiritual life in English country houses. Conrad’s pertinence to Naipaul is ...”

“... noticeable contrast to Vaughan Williams. Tippett was enthusing about English Renaissance music – Henry Purcell, Orlando Gibbons, Thomas Tallis – twenty years before the Early Music revival of the 1950s. He came to revere Beethoven and Stravinsky, adored the visionary American composer Charles Ives, and distrusted the postcard folksiness of British ...”

“... on the Thames. The post-production editor was busy on his laptop erasing the passenger ferries, power station and wind turbines on the horizon. I have never been in a place layered with so many structures ranging from the 16th to the 21st century. But after the crowds of extras assembled and the cavalry began to charge, I was transported to Manchester in ...”