“... In Diderot’s ‘Les Bijoux Indiscrets’, a man acquires a ring which has the power to make sexual organs speak. Michel Foucault says that he wants to make that ring speak for itself. (He sketched part of his project in this paper last summer: Vol. 3, No 9.) Sexuality ‘traces that line of foam which shows just how far speech may advance on the sands of silence ...”

“... owes something to Shakespeare’s unique mastery of ends hard not to state as opposites: the power to entertain and the power to mean. The bridging of the two in the writer’s work gives some sense of his giant reticent power of mind. To quote William Empson, on another ...”

“... are now, with Messrs X and Y (named, their careers itemised as for Who’s Who) in positions of power in publishing-houses; our true literary talents – David Jones, Basil Bunting, Charles Tomlinson and Geoffrey Hill – not forming a group, as they should, and in any case not read; and the food on British railways simply terrible (page 238: ‘Have you ...”

“... Fox at 16 during one of his formative visits to Paris, was startled by his intellectual power and maturity and already foresaw him as ‘a very great acquisition to the publick’, if the lure of a life of cosmopolitan dissipation, already strong on him, did not distract him. Fox calmly agreed with this estimate of his potential, but refused to give ...”

“... is less attractive than Bacon’s, and all the elaborate apologias of his many admirers and the power and magnificence of his prose only increase the distaste we feel in the presence of the man. Never was such a subtle and splendid intellect employed to serve meaner or more trivial ends, and neither pride nor gratitude nor loyalty to friends were allowed to ...”

“... each one in turn, drawing off the last remnants, getting his final money’s worth. The man is Henry Drax – a perfectly ordinary Yorkshire surname, from the village near Selby, now best known as the site of Britain’s largest coal-fired power station. Perhaps because of the echoes of ‘Dracula’, as well as that ...”

“... members of the press from the Crystal Palace or at least to make them buy their entrance tickets. Henry Cole, who was prepared to consider all ‘novelties’, was appalled at this reaction, and eventually it was he who won the day. The Exhibition, he felt, above all else needed publicity, and he was relieved not only when the reporters came in dozens but ...”

“... remark that ‘Poems: 1909-1925 by Mr. T. S. Eliot is a spiritual epilogue to The Education of Henry Adams’ is supplied with no reminder, or minder, that Eliot had reviewed The Education of Henry Adamsin 1919. Even when the editor resigns himself to being informative, he manages to withhold something of interest. There ...”

“... explorers, not usually prone to doubts. ‘What should be called the source of a river?’ Henry Morton Stanley asked. ‘A lake which receives the insignificant rivers flowing into it and discharges all by one great outlet, or the tributaries which the lake collects?’ Stanley favoured the former theory, pointing out that otherwise it would be ...”

“... the measure of engineering failure or success. Fifty people are killed off in the first chapter of Henry Petroski’s To Forgive Design: Understanding Failure when a plane crashes en route to Buffalo. Thirteen hundred or more died when the levees failed in New Orleans. The number of victims grows with each example: the earthquake in Haiti; the collapse of the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... others, 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 ...”

“... system for a generation is about to hit the headlines again. Some time in the next few weeks Baden Henry Skitt, former Scotland Yard Commander and Chief Constable of Hertfordshire, now a chief investigator for the Criminal Cases Review Commission, will draft a public statement on the A6 murder, for which James Hanratty was hanged in 1962. The Commission ...”

“... from Morocco to Indonesia. Lewis is implicitly challenged in a number of respects, too, in Henry Munson’s stimulating book, Islam and Revolution in the Middle East. Take, for example, Lewis’s endorsement of the familiar argument that there is no separation of religion and politics in Islam. ‘It is all very well,’ Munson writes, ‘to say there ...”

“... bisexual actor who takes the part of Paul, Julie’s first lover, and then more deeply with Henry, the American who directs the play that Sarah makes out of Julie’s life. Neither Bill nor Henry is responsible for what Sarah sees as a calamity. She loves them because the disturbing thoughts occasioned by Julie’s ...”