“... of the Rabbit series; this new book is the third of a sequence about the New York Jewish novelist Henry Bech. As it carries him into his seventies it may be that this is the last of Bech, as Rabbit at Rest was presumably the last of Rabbit, but as long as the real author is alive, fertile and motile, one cannot be sure. Bech is a strange antitype, a funhouse ...”

“... Minor resemblances between this novel by Ian McEwan and Henry James’s What Maisie Knew have already been noticed and are of some interest. James left a quite full record of the development of his story, which described modern divorce and adultery from the point of view of a young girl. It had its roots in Solomon’s offer to satisfy rival maternal claimants by cutting the disputed child in half, but it grew far more complicated in the years between the first notebook entry on this topic and the completion of the novel about ‘the partagé child ...”

“... of 1587 also saw the visit to Scotland of Guillaume de Salluste, seigneur du Bartas, courtier of Henry, King of Navarre, and the leading exponent of Calvinist poetics. James had admired du Bartas’s poetry for several years and it strongly influenced his own verse. The visit was at his invitation, though it was also used by Navarre to advance James’s ...”

“... army, his leading generals (the ‘successors’) ramped up this image-making campaign, drawing power from the myth of the man they had served for thirteen years.Neither Alexander nor his generals could have imagined how spectacularly their publicity efforts would succeed. Over the decades and centuries that followed, his legend grew and ramified across the ...”

“... last college meeting I attended. Now all was forgiven and even forgotten. I had done as well as Henry Sacheverell, for long the most notorious fellow of the college. The Vice-President proposed a party in college when the portrait should be unveiled. This was for me a happy and also a moving occasion. I had not realised how many friends I possessed in ...”

“... of your own size can be more satisfying than battering helplessly on the established centres of power: the Anti-Nazi League drew young enthusiasts from a wide political spectrum. The National Front, in its turn, needed the Anti-Nazi League (or some equivalent). The prospect of a legitimised punch-up was one of the recruiting draws of the NF. The ...”

“... by contrast, was inhabited by giants, notably the ‘great triumvirate’ of John C. Calhoun, Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, as well as eloquent spokesmen on both sides of the slavery question, such as Stephen Douglas and William Seward. John Quincy Adams didn’t consider it beneath him to serve in the House after his term as president. Such men offer a ...”

“... On a typical day​ , John Henry Salter would rise to shoot wildfowl at dawn. A GP in the Essex village of Tolleshunt D’Arcy for 65 years (he died in 1932, aged 91, while still working as the local doctor), he ministered to his patients in the morning, tended his dogs and plants in the afternoon, gave his evenings to committees, and seldom went to bed without completing his diary ...”

“... balance of the world decisively shifted. The United States took over the role of premier Western power and it began to dawn on British politicians and their generals that the game was finally up. In any case, Roosevelt had already made it quite clear that the price of the United States’s entry into the war in Europe was that the British should give up ...”

“... by her; G.H. Lewes in a rash moment called her the most remarkable writer of the century. Henry James, of all people, loved her ‘serene volubility’. It is not likely, he wrote, that posterity will travel with her novels in its trunk, but when they have gone out of fashion and are rediscovered in dusty corners of old libraries, the discoverers will ...”

“... combined fashion, philanthropy and philandering in ways that could have made him a character in a Henry James novel. More consequentially, Loomis’s mother was a Stimson, of the patrician New York banking and professional family. Loomis was extremely close to his older cousin Henry Stimson, who, after establishing himself ...”

“... to learn that Mayfair retains its high status and exclusive reputation: but the riches and power to which it now plays host are institutional and governmental rather than patrician or titled. The Mayfair Estate came into the Grosvenor family through an advantageous marriage in 1677 between Sir Thomas Grosvenor and the heiress Mary Davies, who also ...”

“... popular democracy and the mass media; go back to ancient Egypt and the correlation of beauty with power would probably not have caused any young woman to lift an eyebrow, let alone to dream of collagen implants. Monumental images were limited (no movie screens or giant billboards) and controlled (no nubile lovelies cavorting on the TV in the living-room), so ...”

“... Like his elder contemporary Henry James, Eça de Queirós belongs to the small and distinguished group of 19th-century novelists who wrote in exile. He was born in 1845 in a remote town of northern Portugal, but spent most of his working life in England and France. He liked to maintain that his novels were fundamentally French, and that he himself was French in everything but his fondness for ballad-singers and cod with onions ...”

“... mute are given a say in things,’ Kipling does not, of course, stop short at human beings. Henry James, who admired – indeed adored – him, deprecated this process nonetheless, and in a famous comment once observed that he had abandoned humans for horses, dogs, locomotives and parts of ships. Kipling did give a voice of sorts to all these, and by no ...”