“... 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 ...”

“... besides, or in spite of, the ones they depict. This isn’t a new charge – even an admirer like Henry James thought Burne-Jones’s ‘languishing type … savours of monotony’ – but that hasn’t stopped reviewers of the Tate show serving up stale critique. Jonathan Jones of the Guardian called Burne-Jones ‘stupid’, while to Waldemar Januszczak of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Along the narrow tarmac road linking Kabul to Kandahar you could be in New Mexico: green valleys, with scattered trees turning orange and yellow; clusters of adobe-style walled compounds; and looming above huge barren mountains and empty blue skies. This small road is one of the few signs of progress in an appallingly underdeveloped country; indeed, it is one of only very few paved roads in the whole of Afghanistan ...”

“... Sea during the debates that immediately preceded the British-Irish Union. The Scottish politician Henry Dundas, an admirer of Smith and the prime mover behind the union, advanced an anti-feudalist rationale for British-Irish integration; and there were also echoes of Smith among Irish unionists, with Thomas Brook Clarke contending that it was only through ...”

“... and his party leave. 28 March. I go up the street to Sesame, the organic shop, slipping on a green corduroy jacket. I’m also wearing an old pair of green corduroy trousers so it looks like a suit. It makes me remember how Gielgud used to be excited – or pretended to be – by corduroy. ‘Corduroy! My dear!’ And ...”

“... Thomas Hardy to T.S. Eliot, not to speak of confrères such as Edward Thomas, Rupert Brooke and Henry Newbolt. Ezra Pound, although savage in his denunciation of the use of idioms or phrases such as ‘dim lands of peace’ – locutions that abound in de la Mare – still found that on occasion volumes such as Peacock Pie or The Listeners truly hit the ...”

“... ties, turtlenecks or Nehru jackets are the rule for men, with only four neck dimples in sight: Henry VIII as a young man, heavily jewelled, but in a scoop-neck shirt beneath his doublet; and three men of the 1930s in the liberal uniform of an open-necked blue shirt – the anthropologist Humfry Gilbert Garth Payne, Stephen Spender and Sir William ...”

“... there had been no good way not to fight. Thomson’s father took him to see Laurence Olivier’s Henry V in 1945, the year after its release. ‘He said it was a matter of duty.’ The standard British movie fare of the day had plenty of ‘syrup’, he recalls, to ladle over the ‘suet pudding’ of tremulous national morale.Sands of Iwo Jima (1949), in ...”

“... Penguin translation. Back then, their classics were distinguished by the overall jacket colour: green for France, red for Russia, olive-green for Germany, purple and brown for the Classical world, and so on. The book was too subtle for me, of course, and I failed to find it at all erotic. I doubt I understood the scene in ...”

“... in suspicion or a kind of dread. Under the sketch the artist Gérard has scribbled: ‘eyes green, complexion pale: coat of green stripe, gilet blue on white, cravat red on white’. A man, as Belloc put it, for colour rather than ornament. The face is still very young; the expression is closed, guarded, as if he had ...”