“... what she was going through? ‘Language has not yet been adjusted,’ reflected the physician, Thomas Beddoes, ‘with any degree of exactness, to our inward feelings.’ Miss Martineau’s tender womb certainly entered the public domain, and she was no slouch at what Post-Modernists now call ‘writing the body’; but for all that, the historian is left ...”

“... detail takes the place of the speculatively personal. If 1599 – when Shakespeare wrote Henry V, Julius Caesar and As You Like It, as well as beginning Hamlet – was ‘the most decisive year of his career, one in which he redefined himself and his theatre’, that transformation could be understood only in relation to the year’s turbulent ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a final jump – through the paper hoop of Norman Mailer’s ‘faction’ – into the company of Thomas Pynchon and Thomas Berger. One of his propositions is that ‘as far as the intellectuals are concerned, the prophecy that a literature of the West would emerge to liberate America from European and ...”

“... prose. For learned disputes had gentlemanly antecedents, and so had learned fabrications; even Thomas Warton was guilty, and he was the author of the standard History of English Poetry, a work some Shakespeare hunters saw as a model for their much desired history of English drama. The deceits practised by the 19th-century forgers were more ...”

“... had been reading the profile of a serial murderer. Isaacson is probably right to begin with young Henry’s abused German-Jewish boyhood. ‘My Jew-boy’, Nixon was later to call him – at least once on the White House tapes – and it’s clear that many of Kissinger’s traits were acquired early on in Fürth. His family was one of those which did not ...”

“... in that walk sidling about his codpiece’. Such attributes indicated moral failings. The diplomat Henry Wotton, by contrast, writing in 1602, had found James ‘of medium stature, of vigorous constitution, his shoulders broad … In his eyes and in the outward expression of his face, there appears a certain natural goodness verging on modesty.’ Three ...”

“... all who are associated with this court.’ He was the 33rd chief magistrate, a role once held by Henry Fielding, who presided over the first detective force, the Bow Street Runners.The same thing has been happening everywhere. Five years ago, and a few miles away, what was once Old Street Magistrates’ Court was turned into the Courthouse Hotel. The ...”

“... representational skill and – in England at least – the most marketable. It was a gift which Thomas Gainsborough showed early; in one account, so impressing a friend of his mother’s when he was still a boy that his father was persuaded he should go to London for instruction. But this talent wasn’t necessarily combined with other painterly ...”

“... receives the most discourteous rebuff of all – at least in this capacity. I mean, of course, Thomas Jefferson. On 9 May 1825, Jefferson wrote to Henry Lee about the Declaration that ‘neither aiming at originality of principle or sentiment, nor yet copied from any particular and previous writing, it was intended to be ...”

“... signs and wonders. They inspire large gestures towards New Beginnings. In 1900, the year in which Thomas Keneally’s most recent novel situates itself, the separate Australian colonies were reeling from economic depression and the worst drought since European settlement began in 1788. There were catastrophic losses of cattle and sheep, wheat plummeted to ...”

“... the golden dolly league in Regency London was the Coutts squad: the widow and three daughters of Thomas Coutts the banker. All were flush with cash from his gigantic fortune (probably well over a million) and all married aristocrats. The widow, 45 at her husband’s death, was perhaps no longer a dolly; but no dolly came more golden. She’d inherited most ...”

“... of the Rabbit series; this new book is the third of a sequence about the New York Jewish novelist Henry Bech. As it carries him into his seventies it may be that this is the last of Bech, as Rabbit at Rest was presumably the last of Rabbit, but as long as the real author is alive, fertile and motile, one cannot be sure. Bech is a strange antitype, a funhouse ...”

“... title implies, sanctuary seeking led to tense, unpredictable situations. The most notorious case, Thomas Becket’s murder in 1170, was shocking not only because he was slain in his own cathedral, but because on returning from exile he had explicitly sought sanctuary there. Only the public penance of Henry II and an ...”

“... and imagination but because for much of his life he was furiously overworked as house manager for Henry Irving’s Lyceum Theatre in London. Aside from Dracula, Stoker wrote nothing of note, and plenty that was excruciating. ‘There is a semi-heroic, Everyman quality about his intense command of the mediocre,’ the critic Ludovic Flow wrote, ‘as if the ...”