“... of Wyclif’s doctrine on this matter would be that all dominion (ownership and rights, the power to govern, the right to own property, or to confer the sacraments) originates with God, and on earth is properly enjoyed and exercised only by those in a state of grace, improperly by sinners. That might appear to mean, in practice, that the secular ...”

“... are set at a very precise date, with debates about socialism, Britain’s decline as a world power, and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Both works exude a sense, alive in McEwan’s work since The Child in Time (1987), of Britain itself, its recent history and its public life, as an anchor in the narrative. Carefully researched moments in real time ...”

“... notably in his case, by family example. Until his late thirties, like his father, the theologian Henry James Sr, he had experienced breakdowns in which invalidism was compounded by the threat of insanity; like his brother Henry, 15 months his junior, he had had acute problems with his back and with constipation; like his ...”

“... his ‘intense personal ambition and desire to dominate’. Sexual passion and the love of power tore her apart. It seemed impossible to reconcile her sensual and intellectual needs. ‘I don’t know how it will end,’ she wrote. ‘Certainly not in my happiness.’ Chamberlain’s rejection of her, as brutal in its way as ...”

“... for Psychical Research. They included the philosopher Frederic Myers; the progressive thinkers Henry Sidgwick, the founder of Newnham College, Cambridge, and his wife, Eleanor Balfour, sister of the future Prime Minister; and Oliver Lodge, a brilliant younger scientist who continued to defend ectoplasm well into the Einsteinian era. Richet had enlisted the ...”

“... of contemporary critics. Compounding with half will please nobody. From The Comic Sense of Henry James (1960) through A World Elsewhere (1966) and The Performing Self (1971) to Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing (1977), Poirier has pursued a consistent and inventive enquiry into literary language, and into the politics of literary language. ‘When a ...”

“... A portrait​ of Henry James hangs in the Strangers’ Dining Room at the Reform Club. The picture was acquired in 2008, and is on the same red wall as portraits of Dickens and Thackeray. James is seated and sunlight falls on the left temple of his semi-bald head – he’s in his late sixties – and he looks up, distracted, as if someone had just entered the room ...”

“... not been overpraised. There are other forms of artificiality behind the title. It has echoes of Henry Ford’s doomed ‘Fordlandia’, the utopian rubber-tapping city he attempted to establish in the Brazilian jungle to provide for his car factories. It also suggests ‘swampland in Florida’, a phrase synonymous with a real estate scam in which worthless ...”

“... the Dunlop Rubber Company and Chairman of the Board of Trade Utility Furniture Committee; admiring Henry Moore, he was immensely proud ‘of having once helped him through the CIAD’ (Central Institute of Art and Design). He was also something of a literary man, who by the age of 51 had published 140 reviews and miscellaneous pieces; of these just four are in ...”

“... had help, of course. Alcohol, Angleton’s own personality, the very nature of spy-catching, the power of bureaucracies, and the appalling inefficiency of the CIA’s system of checks and controls, all contributed to Angleton’s paranoia. But even Angleton would have had to admit that in Philby’s terrible personal treachery lies the key to understanding ...”

“... usury. Within prescribed limits as to the level of interest, it had been legal since the time of Henry VIII, but it was a sin, and best left to the inhabitants of the ghetto, though they too were forbidden by their religion to practise it, except (Deuteronomy 23.20) on strangers. That Shakespeare wants the audience to be thinking about these matters is ...”

“... But then in the late Forties Abstract Expressionism came, producing something with the scale and power of public art, although these paintings, like the Chrysler Building and the Rockefeller Centre, were self-referential. They did not glorify the city, or victories, or political alliances, or history, or the land, but the artist himself and his ...”

“... will be less rewarding. His protagonists are forceful, knowing, rational, sometimes monsters. Power and fame, getting ahead: these are essential American themes; and the lengths some go to achieve power and, once in possession of it, go about protecting and expanding it the better to coerce others, these are Vidal’s ...”

“... history of Rome’s civil wars, and Jonson’s friend Sir Robert Cotton rewriting the reign of Henry III, with an eye to Jacobean political anxieties. Cotton was among the most learned historians of his time. Yet his account of Henry’s reign abandons factual accuracy. Behind it there lies instead the old literary model ...”

“... different from what might be found in the pages of a book. Listen to this, for instance, from III Henry VI, a very early play. Richard, Duke of York has fatally lost a battle: … all my followers to the eager foe Turn back and fly, like ships before the wind, Or lambs pursu’d by hunger-starved wolves. His sons rally to him, and they counter-attack: With ...”