“... philosophising guaranteed his implacable exclusion from it. T.S. Eliot’s celebrated comment on Henry James – ‘a mind so fine that no idea can violate it’ – sounds like a crafty backhanded compliment but in fact represents, from the virulently anti-intellectualist Eliot, the sincerest praise. The un-Christian Lawrence believed devoutly in the ...”

“... of ideological complacence. On the contrary: her prose is always in too much of a rush (her cousin Henry Holland called her charming letters ‘a heterogeneous mass of nonsense’) ever to calm down and show itself pleased with itself. What is lacking is the note of intimacy, the tone so natural to Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Barbara Pym or Elizabeth Bowen ...”

“... shrewd guess that Larkin published no more novels because he feared failure, in that genre, of the power to keep going with his own separate world of art? It seems likely that Amis has done something which in terms of the novel may be more difficult, and that is to carry the reader with him into whatever new places his interests or imagination have led ...”

“... story), proved both an inspiration and a source for those who questioned or challenged monarchical power. While his significance has been noted by earlier scholars, nobody has explored so fully the extent of Lucan’s hold on mid-17th-century imaginations, nor his challenge to the Augustanism Virgil had celebrated. Lucan’s great cultural contribution may ...”

“... or of such mid-20th-century experimental styles as the nouveau roman. Indeed they testify to the power, or if you prefer, the inertia, of that great central tradition. Rohinton Mistry has an affinity with Dickens, and some say with Stendhal, but the English novelist he most resembles seems to be Arnold Bennett. Bennett was a novelist of great skill and ...”

“... one way or another as soon as they’re published: ‘In the United States,’ Gates writes, ‘power outages are so rare that people remember that one time a decade ago when the lights went out and they got stuck in an elevator.’ But being slightly out of date doesn’t really matter, because the solutions that Gates sketches out haven’t fundamentally ...”

“... and Landscape at the British Museum (until 22 January) shows the range of his work. The peculiar power of the early pictures is reaffirmed and what had become of his talent by the end of his career can be judged. In the suns, moons, bright sunsets, dawns and evenings of some of these later pictures the spiritual light of Shoreham still flickers. In others it ...”

“... Sydney Smith Haldimand Dickens (after the famous wit and the philanthropist, both friends), Henry Fielding Dickens (‘in a kind of homage’, Forster was told, ‘to the style of the novel he was about to write’). An exception is the ninth child, Dora Annie Dickens, named after the brainless girl David Copperfield loves and whom Dickens, at the ...”

“... of property and of labour, the difference of rank and condition among mankind, are the sources of power in civilised life, its moving causes, and even its very soul.’ Davy, with an eye for the main chance, knew that his ambitions – for science as well as for himself – depended on severing the association in the public mind between science and ...”

“... in the Victorian age, when the cult of domesticity reached its peak. In 1852 the composer Henry Bishop relaunched ‘Home, Sweet Home’, the parlour ballad which the opera singer Jenny Lind made wildly popular. Ten years later the great antiquary Thomas Wright published his History of Domestic Manners and Sentiments in England during the Middle ...”

“... current lady, tried and failed to put her foot down but put a finger on the source of Jean’s power and appeal, in her writing as in her life: ‘Here was I cast for the role of the fortunate wife who held all the cards, and she for that of the poor, brave and desperate beggar who was doomed to be let down by the bourgeoisie. I learnt what a powerful ...”

“... In Henry James’s The Golden Bowl, the Prince found by the River Thames ‘a more convincing image of the truth of the ancient state than any they have left by the Tiber’. Of course, the truth of the ancient state, like the truth of the British state at the turn of the 19th century, was not necessarily a wholly savoury one ...”

“... be in the interest of the most venerable institutions of the state that they should do so. King Henry V is all the better for having been Prince Hal, but no woman could propose to imitate the sun (or the moon?) and allow the base contagious clouds to smother up her virtue and beauty from the world in order that her charms should shine out all the more ...”

“... one to whom England had violently objected before he had even set foot there. In 1553, Mary Tudor, Henry VIII’s first-born daughter, had acceded to the throne following the death of Henry’s teenage son, Edward VI. As fervently Catholic as Edward had been Protestant, Mary was determined to restore papal supremacy in ...”

“... Adams’s script the two playwrights complicate the mutual attraction developed while co-writing Henry VI by flirting with the possibility of betraying and/or killing each other, for reasons never satisfactorily explained by some clunky passages of political exposition. While their imagined relationship owes something to that between Mephistopheles and ...”