“... My second moment came when Professor H.W.R. Wade QC – as of the Queen’s Birthday Honours, Sir Henry Wade – was called to the witness box. Now Wade is not only a gentle giant of a man – but one of transparent distinction and complete modesty. It was duly extracted from him that he had been Professor of English Law at Oxford from 1961 until 1976 and ...”

“... the Venerable Bede, and its modern exponents include such engaging and stylish writers as Charles Thomas, Leslie Alcock and Henry Mayr-Harting. The literary sources have attracted much idiosyncratic talent, for they possess the fascination of a cryptic crossword in which one must sift fact from propaganda, post-Norman ...”

“... It was written sometime between 1939 and 1941 – Capote was born in 1924 – to his schoolmate Thomas Flanagan. Flanagan kept it all his life. It read: ‘I do hereby solemnly affirm that any statements I may have made about Thomas Flanagan, or said that he had made, were calumnies and lies on my part. Truman ...”

“... who occupied comparable positions of high office, an unusual set of characters emerges. One is Henry Wallace, vice-president under Roosevelt, who committed political suicide in 1946 in front of an audience of twenty thousand in Madison Square Garden with these words: Russian ideas of social-economic justice are going to govern nearly a third of the ...”

“... Mahasweta Devi, Sivarama Karanth, Gopinath Mohanty, Vishwas Patil. (He could also have quoted Henry Fielding, who claimed in Tom Jones to ‘describe … not an individual, but a species’.)Ghosh regrets the hiving off of so-called genre writing as the category of literary fiction narrowed and calcified, but he doesn’t much care for ‘disaster stories ...”

“... think, breathes something of that ‘air of reality (solidity of specification)’ which seemed to Henry James ‘the supreme virtue of a novel – the merit on which all its other merits ... helplessly and submissively depend’. Unfortunately, that one – Pat Barker’s The Century’s Daughter – is also a consciously ‘working-class’ fiction whose ...”

“... Yet there are drawbacks. As a novel, it is far from wishing to woo us, or not to bore us. Like Henry James, almost, it seems too intent and majestically preoccupied with its conversational nuances to imagine that this could happen. That is impressive, just as it is in Henry James. There may be a slight overkill on the ...”

“... enjoyed Indian careers of their own, and his eldest daughter, Charlotte, married the son of Sir Thomas Metcalfe, the British resident at Delhi. Mount has always been intrigued by cliques, elites and who knows who. The Shakespears were connected to the Thackerays (Augusta was the novelist’s cousin), and with the Metcalfes also thrown in, Mount is able to ...”

“... later I was stoned out of my mind. Back in the room, my father was absorbed in an article about Henry James. I discovered that the shower emitted hot water. It felt like divine intervention. I’ve no idea how long I spent under the nozzle, transfixed by the warm rush. When I emerged, the room was four inches deep in steaming water. The drain was ...”

“... brought retribution down on culprits ranging from retailers of saucy postcards to the publisher Henry Vizetelly, jailed for issuing Zola’s works in translation. Taking stock in 1891, Oscar Wilde complained that the Fourth Estate ‘has eaten up the other three. The Lords Temporal say nothing, the Lords Spiritual have nothing to say, and the House of ...”

“... The myth of Robin Hood was well established by the time the sparkish Prince Harry, the future Henry V, was engaged in mischievous highway robberies, possibly little more than royal horseplay, along with that other ‘gentleman robber’ Falstaff (as unreliably described in Shakespeare’s ...”

“... fiction very easy after all that arduous tiling. He was writing at a time when such masters as Henry James, Conrad and Ford were agonising a lot about modern technique, but although he seems to have found the business of technique quite interesting – or rather, although he made a few knowing nods in that direction – what he really liked was to get on ...”

“... Street crash, witnesses the rise of Nazism in Berlin (where he attends parties with Fritz Lang and Thomas Mann), and arrives in Hollywood just in time to fall foul of McCarthyism. Any Human Heart (2002) is narrated by Logan Mountstuart, an English author who knocks about Oxford and London with the likes of Cyril Connolly and ...”

“... scenes from tumbling into Hieronymus Bosch-like orgies, or erupting into the bawdy romps of Thomas Rowlandson. His theory of line, Beardsley claimed, was his only original idea. Instead of ‘thin lines to express backgrounds and thick lines to express foregrounds’, he kept ‘the same value of line’ in both. The resulting flattened monochrome ...”

“... Bartholomeus Breenbergh, to contemporary British artists such as Amelia Long, Paul Sandby and Thomas Gainsborough, a selection of which are on display. His admiration for Claude Lorrain led him to acquire more than 270 of Lorrain’s landscape drawings, seven of which are included in the show.Of particular interest among the works on display is a drawing ...”