“... like Hastings: in Left Review, a publication to which the AIA founders regularly contributed, Tom Wintringham wrote of its first group show in Charlotte Street that it showed ‘more real acquaintance with, more real feeling for, the working-class movement than for the working class itself’. This might have been because of closeness rather than ...”

“... work is, he continued, try a thought-experiment. Take a truly great writer from the past – O. Henry was the example he proposed – and imagine him transported by a time machine to the present: he would be able to write a novel by Faulkner or Pynchon in a week. But imagine Faulkner or Pynchon transported to the past: they could work all their lives and ...”

“... Nora Barnacle’s hotel might well have been lost on Beckett. He specialised, after all, unlike Henry James, in allowing many things to be entirely lost on him. Like Wilde, he belonged to that group of Protestant geniuses who thought they should speak up just as their land-owning and money-owning colleagues were clearing out of Ireland or learning to keep ...”

“... was an immediate million-seller, and its success unleashed a flurry of like-minded books. Tom Peters teamed up with Nancy Austin to restate the main arguments in A Passion For Excellence2 – a second-try book which set out to be a little more practical in its recommendations and which also tried to counter the macho-zen bias of the first book by ...”

“... middle section, in fact – focuses on St Peter’s loving recollections of his former student Tom Outland, a prodigy and inventor who was killed in the First World War. The novel also offers a precursor to the two priest protagonists of Death Comes for the Archbishop in the figure of Father Duchene, who is described thus:Long afterwards Father Duchene ...”

“... in his 1993 afterword mentions Malcolm Lowry, Proust, Finnegans Wake and Moby-Dick; Tom McCarthy in his new introduction invokes Döblin, Laforgue, Plato, Shakespeare, Derrida, Bataille and Adorno. Sensibly neither makes reference to Gide’s The Counterfeiters, published in 1925, whose handling of the themes of originality and authenticity has ...”

“... scarcely read the newspapers, relying on a press summary prepared for her by her spokesman Henry James, a career civil servant who had worked for both Heath and Wilson and was as grave and imposing a figure as his literary namesake. When James was succeeded by Bernard Ingham, who had worked for Barbara Castle, presentation certainly hotted up. Ingham ...”

“... In the song ‘Alma’ – written soon after her obituaries appeared in December 1964 – Tom Lehrer imagines all modern women being jealous of her ‘for bagging Gustav and Walter and Franz’. How did she do it? At first, at least, she had great beauty. As a young woman, Alma Schindler, Emil’s oldest daughter, was said to be ‘the loveliest girl ...”

“... father James I’s leading minister the Duke of Buckingham donned false beards, assumed the names Tom and John Smith, and journeyed to the Spanish court to woo the infanta for Charles? Incognito travel, a commonplace practice of the age, produced a succession of improbable adventures, among them (as if in compensation for the Puritan closure of the ...”

“... popular memory, the Second World War remains the ‘good war’, fought, to borrow the title of Tom Brokaw’s 1998 book, by the ‘greatest generation’. It is remembered as a time of national unity that not only destroyed tyrannies overseas but assimilated young men from all regions and ethnic backgrounds into a shared American identity. The war in ...”

“... few poems are explicitly attributed to other authors). But one of the poems has been traced to Henry Constable, another has been found in Procter’s Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant Inventions, and I suspect that a search through the relevant first-line indices might bear further fruit. C.S. Lewis says of the charming ‘Hay! nou the day dauis’ that ‘the ...”

“... and his girlfriend Aubade lie around, immobilised, thinking about the Laws of Thermodynamics, Henry Adams, heat death, and the imminent decline of all energy. It is a mostly charming, sometimes tiresome showoff piece, but the way it is laid out offers, as does the apartment itself, a neat diagram of how in the novels Pynchon apportions things on a more ...”

“... to a country where the black-white ratio is quite the reverse of what it is in the US. (When Henry Ford, on last visiting his investments in South Africa, was questioned about his company’s policy on black employment, he actually boasted of Ford’s ‘proud record towards minorities’.)Despite Adam and Moodley’s quotation, such strictures do not ...”

“... minorities learn about their worth, or lack of it. Some families manage a welcome (the writer Tom Wakefield, son of a Staffordshire coal miner, often talked about his family’s clear-eyed acceptance of him), some do not. It’s noticeable that in Sterling Karat Gold the only families (apart from Chachki Smok’s mother, not characterised apart from being ...”

“... British-born professing Jews, of which the bar to a Parliamentary career was the most obvious. Henry Mayhew, the great chronicler of London life in the mid-19th century, was told by a Jewish professional that it was unlikely that one Jew in ten, ‘activated solely by his own feelings, would trouble himself to walk the length of the street in which he ...”