“... 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 ...”

“... of objects. In novels by William Dean Howells, Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, Kathleen Thompson, Henry James, Edith Wharton and others, the encounter with technology is a small step taken, often regardless, on a journey defined by an ever-shifting horizon of expectations and disappointments. Only in retrospect do we understand that it has unobtrusively ...”

“... of its own arse to start talking about Northern Ireland. 19 July. Watch two good programmes about Henry Moore, one of whose works, a Reclining Figure bought for the city, could still raise a storm of protest in Leeds as late as 1951. Now of course the city is home to the Henry Moore Institute. Moore has no trace, even early ...”

“... most staunch supporters in the 1930s. Few were more unwavering in their support than his brother Henry, yet even he complained the previous year that ‘sometimes you remind me of a gentleman in full evening dress and white gloves attempting to put something right with the kitchen plumbing without soiling his attire.’ It comes as no surprise when the great ...”

“... sphere and women were relegated to home and the private sphere. Hollander makes powerful use of Thomas Laqueur’s recent book, Making Sex, to support her arguments here. She draws on his proposition that an original one-sex model, in which women were seen as fundamentally the same as men was replaced by the end of the 18th century by a two-sex model, which ...”

“... our knowledge of the working practices of the Elizabethan theatre is based, but the records of Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels from 1622 to 1642, a complementary treasure-trove on Jacobean and Caroline court entertainments and dramatic censorship; Malone who first trawled systematically through the parish and corporation records of Stratford for the ...”

“... euphemisms for ‘Communist’. They attained their apogee in the 1948 third party campaign of Henry Wallace, an operation managed by ‘very, very progressive people’. Not only the threat of Soviet rivalry but the emergence of facts about Stalin’s tyranny destroyed a mood of comity based on expediency and fiction. Another circumstance was no less ...”

“... from theirs. Evelyn Waugh is often invoked by reviewers of St Aubyn, but Jane Austen and Henry James might be equal influences, the Austen and James whose drawing-room performers are in some ways inseparable, stylistically at least, from the authors’ own performances. In St Aubyn’s world, the upper classes are both as unpleasant and as clever as ...”

“... of 1835). The desire for one was certainly there. Beating Grimm very slightly to the punch, Thomas Keightley brought out his Fairy Mythology in 1828; Margaret Murray’s The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, which appeared nearly a century later, had a similar aim. Since then, books and articles about the ‘fairy faith’ have continued to appear. But ...”

“... few hymnodists who have been accepted or half-accepted into the literary canon – George Herbert, Thomas Ken, Watts, Charles Wesley – but many less celebrated names, such as Sir Robert Grant, William Walsham How, William Chatterton Dix: Grant (‘O worship the King, all glorious above’), the Scottish-born English MP who ended his life as Governor of ...”

“... models,’ she writes in this new biography, ‘are Renaissance figures such as John Dowland and Thomas Campion.’ (She might have looked sideways to Noël Coward, Bob Dylan or Cole Porter; to John Cage’s poetry, Ezra Pound’s operas, the compositions of Christopher Fry or Anthony Burgess.) One of the aims of her study is to rescue Gurney’s later work ...”