“... seems to have shared his not-so-secret preference for Jane over Cassandra: another Austen nephew, Henry, of whom Austen had been particularly fond in his teens, told a cousin after Austen’s death that whenever he visited the house at Chawton – where Cassandra and Mrs Austen lived on for some years – ‘he could not help expecting to feel particularly ...”

“... of English kings anxious to claim ancient authority, prestige and legitimacy for themselves. Henry Tudor even had the bright idea of calling his eldest son Arthur, presumably in the hope that at the appropriate time – for the legend of the ‘Once and Future King’ was already well established – gullible people would say: ‘Arthur has come ...”

“... archives.2 Beside him are Thomas Sackville, earl of Dorset, and the earls and cousins Charles and Henry Howard. All three were Byrd’s patrons, and to various degrees shared the shifts and ambiguities of his religious convictions; it was odds-on that all of them would have conformed to a restoration of Catholicism in England if it had happened to take ...”

“... displacement creates. His widely admired first book, The Place of the Stage: Licence, Play and Power in Renaissance England (1988), explored the formative influence of the pressures that drove London’s professional acting companies beyond the city boundaries into the Liberties, where they could remain immune to the hostile manoeuvres of the ...”

“... type of discussion. After many years of comfortable mindless enjoyment of Jane Austen, which even Henry James was inclined to endorse, the pendulum may now swing too far the other way, and the critic present us with an author who is interchangeable with any other modern novel-writing intellect. To suppose her covertly demonstrating, through and by means of ...”

“... that’s more the result of moribund acting. There isn’t any doubt about Michael Rooker in Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (one of the few good films I wish I’d never seen): as blank and merciless a psychopath as I’ve ever come across in the movies. But no one has ever been as repeatedly and consistently sinister, morally frightening and ...”

“... he or she might well have mentioned, alongside Darwin and John Stuart Mill, the name of Sir Henry Maine, the subject of Karuna Mantena’s valuable new study. His name isn’t heard much anymore, but in his own day Maine (1822-88) was regarded as a towering public intellectual. He became regius professor of civil law at Cambridge at the age of 25, then ...”

“... of Edward III, surviving the tumultuous reign of Richard II (1377-99), and gaining the favour of Henry IV before what must have been a rather sudden death in 1400. To contextualise his career, Turner provides an extensive political, social, economic and cultural history of England over the second half of the 14th century. But our first glimpse of the young ...”

“... but the victorious soldiers had been roused. Generals such as Oliver Cromwell and his son-in-law Henry Ireton combined a Bible-grounded vengeance against Charles as a ‘man of blood’ with the more practical realisation that a stricken king would always try to win back power. Negotiations, they thought, had to ...”

“... Jay Winter’s introduction to the work in honour of Henry Pelling points to a shift that has been taking place in the writing of labour history – from concentration on militant strivings towards interest in the ordinary existence of working men and women. The first approach was pioneered by a number of Marxist scholars ...”

“... sinister buffoon, the incarnation of Powell’s fascination with psychological types who pursue power. Jenkins greatly dislikes him, but as time passes we come to wonder if the opposition between the two characters is quite as clear-cut as our narrator likes to think. It’s true that Widmerpool does do one or two things that are not much short of outright ...”

“... rather rare comments on Shakespeare’s language. He might say of a particular passage, like Henry V’s soliloquy about the cares of kingship, that it is ‘terribly bad poetry’, but he doesn’t say anything more, except that this ‘is just as it should be’. He would read aloud long passages and pass on without recorded comment. The effect is a ...”

“... Henry Woodd Nevinson is one of my heroes, the sort of person I dream of being. The champion crusader of Edwardian journalism, he filed pro-Revolutionary articles from Russia in 1905, and pro-Nationalist pieces from India. He won an exhausting battle to expose forced labour on the cocoa plantations of Portuguese Angola ...”

“... euphemisms for ‘Communist’. They attained their apogee in the 1948 third party campaign of Henry Wallace, an operation managed by ‘very, very progressive people’. Not only the threat of Soviet rivalry but the emergence of facts about Stalin’s tyranny destroyed a mood of comity based on expediency and fiction. Another circumstance was no less ...”

“... Audience Chamber’, ‘The Bedchamber’, ‘The Merchant’s House’ …) and its subtitle (‘Power, Propaganda and Art’) prepare you for ways of reading that are a long way from ‘map-reading’ as taught to the school cadet corps. You could doubtless have used Jacopo de’ Barbari’s stupendous woodcut of Venice of 1500 to find your way about, but ...”