“... the people of England, Scotland and Ireland; but his judgment must have been warped by ambition. James was not unpopular, and he had proved an effective ruler during his three years in power, in spite of having two Dutch-sponsored rebellions to put down. He had shown that he was not averse to violence, but on the whole his subjects respected him as their ...”

“... He​ does not feed like a mongoose,’ James Irving said of the talking mongoose that had taken up residence – or so it was said – in his remote Isle of Man farmhouse in the early 1930s. Irving told psychic investigators that his family had tried the mongoose – who went by the name of ‘Gef’ – on bread and milk, only to have their food rejected ...”

“... Paul of Tarsus, they call themselves Paul when they are not Paul, Peter when they are not Peter, James when they are not James, Jude when they are not Jude. Sometimes they put in circumstantial detail to make their claims more plausible: so pseudo-Paul tells his gullible readers ‘I, Paul, write this greeting with my own ...”

“... of people of colour and the possible ‘bronzing’, as it was described, of the population. Lord Mansfield’s judgment in 1772 in the case of James Somerset, who had escaped from his owner on British soil, holding that he could not be kidnapped and returned to enslavement in the Caribbean, provoked much public ...”

“... animation on everything the poet saw and put into words. In a sense it was much the same for Henry James, that other great equivocator of the American literary scene, and always a great admirer of Whitman. James’s prose, even the late prose, is paradoxically as physical as Leaves of Grass, and in the same way. A kind of ...”

“... In 1598 the Lord Chamberlain’s Men were forced to dismantle James Burbage’s Theatre in Shoreditch, which they had occupied since their foundation in 1594, so they transported it across the Thames and built their own playhouse on the Bankside. This was the building whose 20th-century replica was christened ‘Shakespeare’s Globe ...”

“... of these English noblemen. He was the much honoured and privileged royal servant to Elizabeth and James for more than half a century, called ‘a father of music’ in the records of the Chapel Royal at his death in his eighties; a man of affairs who, when he produced a list of reasons to become proficient in singing, emphasised first its benefits to health ...”

“... from his old self to his present self. Referring to the death of his mother, ‘I, once a lord of language,’ he says, ‘have no words to express my anguish and my shame.’ Straightway he proceeds to revel in the survival of that lordship. ‘What I suffered then, and still suffer, is not for pen to write or paper to record.’ Yet pen wrote it and ...”

“... By the mid-l780s Knight moved in the liberal, not to say liberated Whig circles that had Charles James Fox as a hero, and ancient Athens as an inspiration. Knight’s first literary attempt was to describe a tour of Sicily in 1777. He hired two artists to accompany him, and briefed them to make meticulous drawings of the archaeological sites. His commentary ...”

“... most good novelists they are preoccupied as much with power as with class. Furbank mentions some lord who said it was ‘middle-class not to decant champagne’. Attitudes to this pronouncement might be taken as a good instance of the difference between ‘unholy pleasure’ and true snobbery. As in the case of the fishknives, most people would be moderately ...”

“... A typical piece of simultaneous realism and symbolism is the fact that Will’s best friend James keeps his diaries (which are secret-but-not-secret: Will reads them with James’s tacit consent) on the same shelf as he keeps his treasured collection of Firbank novels (which embody, more than any other novelist’s ...”

“... Van’ (1855) ‘Eighth Hussars Cooking Hut’ (1855) ‘General Estcourt’ (1855) ‘Lord Balgonie’ (1855) ‘Sebastopol from the Mortar Battery’ (1855) ‘Self-portrait as a Zouave’ (1855) ‘The Valley of the Shadow of Death’ (1855) ‘View from Cathcarts Hill’ (1855)PreviousNext The camera’s capacity for transformation makes us ...”

“... The Duke of Wellington, defending the Lord Chancellor of Ireland for distributing lucrative posts among his family, complained of the ‘senseless outcry against public men for not having overlooked the ties of blood and Nature in dispensing the patronage of office’. Nepotism might offend radicals and the authors of denunciatory Black Books, but it was a fact of public life, and nowhere was the practice more honoured than in the Church of England ...”

“... some of them much more obscure than these, are not. Consequently the reader’s share, as Henry James called it, is quite half; or, to put it another way, unless you are a polymathic historian with some knowledge of literature you will need to do quite a lot of research to figure out what Paulin is doing. This is not a complaint; we are dealing with a ...”

“... shot dead outside Covent Garden Theatre. Her killer was known to her. He was a young clergyman, James Hackman, who immediately attempted to kill himself but failed and was soon afterwards tried and executed for the murder.It was a sensational case. Ray and Sandwich, who was first lord of the Admiralty, were already ...”