“... rulers bothered to learn German, let alone Frisian. The exception was the ultra-keen governor Henry Maxse, a fluent German-speaker determined to make Heligoland straighten its back and polish its boots like a proper British colony. The islanders were flattered but uneasy about this sudden interest in them, and matters came to a head in 1864 when Maxse ...”

“... I went​ to Henry Poole & Co, the oldest tailor on Savile Row, for a fitting. Suits start at £5500, and I couldn’t afford to have one made, but the firm had agreed to teach me the principles of bespoke tailoring by measuring me for an invisible one, so I could at least engage in the fantasy: the emperor’s new clothes ...”

“... read in Oliver Twist was ‘the TRUTH!’ Even Tolstoy needed at times to make the same point. Henry James or George Eliot, on the other hand, never give the impression that the question could arise: the distinction was not part of their artistic outlook or method. But as a touchstone it is still very much around, and can take unexpected forms. Importunity ...”

“... women’s deaths in her time, had also been made fatherless, when by Act of Parliament in 1536 Henry VIII proclaimed her a bastard. Like a figure in a riddle, Elizabeth’s identity was wrapped in enigma, her status unstable, her name challenged: who was she, to what was she heir, to what was she entitled? The extraordinary act of decipherment which Shell ...”

“... they’re also more impassioned. They know what it is like, and they know what they want. It is Henry James, of course, who exhibits at the highest level the combination of the practising novelist’s experience and the finest critical intelligence, but lesser if still considerable writers, such as E.M. Forster (whose Aspects of the Novel has proved so ...”

“... the Calvinist theology. In the same way, Giant Grim and Giant Despair gained much of their power, for Bunyan and for his readers, not by being representations of psychological states but because they showed what it was like trying to cross a country estate owned by a malignant JP with powers of summary arrest, and the ability even to block off the ...”

“... in for ‘sniping’. If you want a good book on dedications, look out for a second-hand copy of Henry B. Wheatley’s The Dedication of Books to Patron and Friend: A Chapter of Literary History (1887). Room lists it in his brief bibliography, so in plundering it he could be accused of plagiarism only by those who believe that there is such a thing as ...”

“... of the 18th-century code of samurai ethics, and The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima by Henry Scott Stokes, and Secker and Warburg Mishima’s tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility, in one attractive volume. At this year’s Cannes Film Festival an American film, Mishima, by Paul Schrader caused considerable controversy; and in the spring I saw in Paris ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... take our places at the dinner table at Salisbury Court in November 1583, ‘as in a late novel by Henry James’: ‘who had done what, who knew who had done what, and who knew who knew who had done what.’ Suspicion hung over the scene like a November fog, already a problem in Elizabethan London. (Those making a film of this book will want to know ...”

“... of Christ’s blood, a gift from the patriarch of Jerusalem. Retracing his coronation route, Henry III processed on foot from St Paul’s to a Westminster Abbey undergoing reconstruction, where he was greeted by more than a hundred monks ‘tearfully singing and exulting’. In an echo of the hippos’ swamp, the Strand was so deep in mud in 1315 that ...”

“... at Harvard. The lecture included the following considerations (transcribed by his brother Henry):The desire to write a letter, to put down what you don’t want anybody else to see but the person you are writing to, but which yet you do not want to be destroyed, but perhaps hope may be preserved for complete strangers to read, is ineradicable. We want ...”

“... the Falklands War was the first war in which the vast majority of citizens of the victorious power began with no idea even of the whereabouts of the territory in dispute. These post-colonial specks in the South Atlantic were, supremely, a diplomat’s preoccupation. Yet not the smallest virtue of Mr Charlton’s important book is the evidence it summons ...”

“... had 66 registers and four manuals, including a 20-stop Great Organ and a 12-stop Pedal Division. Henry Willis’s organ for the Great Exhibition had by then made its way to Winchester Cathedral, and an Edmund Schulze organ, displayed at the Great Exhibition by a Thuringian organ-maker invited there by Prince Albert, had been rebuilt in Northampton. Both were ...”

“... The idea of the painter as a power of nature, an organ of creation in himself, has been as deeply-rooted and long-lasting as anything in the Western legend of the artist. Rubens was every kind of power. He was the instrument of divinity, the tool of statecraft, the agent of dynastic aspirations, the wielder of philoprogenitive potency until the last month of his life and the progenitor not only of children but of generative images to match ...”