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“... theatre, and offers an appealing reading of the second parts of Tamburlaine the Great and Henry IV. As characters who determinedly resist closure, Tamburlaine and Falstaff, he observes, are ideal subjects for a sequel. In an essay on 18th-century women writers, Betty Schellenberg sets out the full range of sequel types: the continuation of a ...”

“... are less likely than Faulkner’s to be snatched into a metaphysical empyrean. She doesn’t, as Henry James would say, ‘cultivate the high pitch and beat the big drum’. What interests her is not so much their existential dilemmas as their physical and moral landscape, the enclosing objects, in which she allows herself virtually to disappear: their ...”

“... gold-orange hair that refused to remain tidy. She had a clear pale complexion, small bright green eyes, zany red lips, broadly rouged in a carefully chosen colour, and an infectious giggle. Her bangles slipped down to her elbow as she waved a welcome with a cigarette held in a long ivory holder. ‘What Mary liked most,’ Virgil Thomson ...”

“... Ada in the name of a garden and an initiative inspired by her insistence on the right of all to green space. As so often when left-wingers are memorialised, all mention of their politics is tacitly omitted. Were they living today, the Salters would be disowned by the faction currently in charge of the Labour Party. Ada Salter refused to fly the Union Jack ...”

“... the fires of Hamburg, Dresden and Cologne somewhere near Maastricht. The Stone Bomb Woodford Green, Essex is not the easiest place in which to seek out a largely forgotten work of public sculpture. Driving north out of London, you can hardly miss the huge bronze figure of Winston Churchill scowling over the empty ...”

“... a project which eventually developed into a large housing estate at Columbia Square in Bethnal Green. (The name survives, but the buildings were demolished not long ago.) And all the while there were speaking engagements. This frenetic activity went on in the midst of other important events in his life. Two children were born, the first, Dora, dying ...”

“... had occurred a couple of years earlier) and was also involved, though not seriously, with a green-eyed lesbian of 35 called Czerna Wilson, who wore her bronze hair in a pigtail that reached her hips. Callahan’s sexual practices are now commonplace, Mary tells us grimly – ‘cf. John Updike’ – but at the time they made her feel ashamed, a shame ...”

“... that mesmerised Americans in Vietnam. ‘Psychologists or sociologists may explain some day,’ Henry Kissinger believes, ‘what it is about that distant monochromatic land, of green mountains and fields merging with an azure sea, that for millennia has acted as a magnet for foreigners who sought glory there and found ...”

“... Emily and her sister Louisa, brought up in Lincolnshire and daughters of the local solicitor Henry Sellwood, had not only known the proliferating Tennyson family since childhood, but seem to have decided which one to bag, as it were, well in advance. Louisa plumped for Charles, Alfred’s immediate elder brother, a sweet man and himself no mean poet, who ...”

“... He was taken up by Maurice Bowra, and through him grew friendly with Kenneth Clark, John Sparrow, Henry Yorke, Alan Pryce-Jones, Osbert Lancaster, Robert Byron, Anthony Powell, Peter Quennell, Tom Driberg, Harold Acton, Christopher Sykes, Randolph Churchill, W.H. Auden, and lots of others, including Gaitskell once more (‘Hugh, may I stroke your ...”

“... Lectures upon the Fourth of John, a Bible and two books of sermons, as well as ribbons, gloves and green silk garters. A wedding was more than a private transaction: the banns were asked three times before the assembled congregation, seeking public endorsement for a proposed union. Marriages celebrated in private or without announcement were ...”

“... high as a room, requiring minutes to do multiplication, have worked? No one knows. Babbage’s son Henry built part of an Analytical Engine after his father’s death; for what the information is worth, it always tended to jam. Babbage did have some reason to be sensitive about government finance. The Difference Engine was funded to the tune of £17,000 under ...”

“... and Denis Rickett. Logan Pearsall Smith, aged 80, starts to tell a story of an American cousin of Henry James who ‘invited the novelist to sleep with him’ but he is overcome by a fit of coughing. By the end of the second page we have also met Kathleen Kennet, James Pope-Hennessy and Clarissa Churchill. And indeed we are little threatened by low ...”

“... cut into sheets. Early European paper bears the marks of this messy process. On a letter sent to Henry III by Berengaria of Castile sometime between 1217 and 1230, the oldest piece of paper to survive in an English archive, it’s still possible to make out the undissolved textile threads. Paper took its medieval European name from the papyrus of the ...”

“... beyond the vast majority of men.’ No story of social progress can account for the heroines in Henry James’s late novels. Their ambition is to be rich, and dress beautifully, and appear magnificent in company. So how is it that we can still sympathise with them? Instead of scheming to acquire a fortune, Kate Croy could train as a doctor or campaign for ...”