“... the reader. T. S. Eliot seems to have made use of him, with some tidying-up, for the part of Sir Henry Harcourt-Reilly in The Cocktail Party. There’s an extravagance typical of the book in the use of words too forcible for the thought they contain, and epigrams are particularly apt to show this up: ‘Love is the first lie; wisdom the last,’ or ‘In ...”

“... The result was what Ezra Pound called ‘Kipling’s “Bigod, I-know-all-about-this” manner.’ Henry James became acquainted with the first Lanchester when it broke down outside his house in Rye, in October 1902. The same vehicle conveyed him, a year later, on a return visit to the Kipling establishment at Bateman’s, in Sussex. During this period James ...”

“... ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens. So wrote Henry Jekyll in Stevenson’s novel. Unlike 19th-century duality, however, modern multiple personality hasn’t been much dealt with in literary fiction. It has flourished on talk shows, in movies and soaps, but in print its main vehicle has been the dramatic ...”

“... Browning, Monckton Milnes, Ruskin, Katie Collins, Arthur Munby, George Eliot, the Carlyles, Henry Cole. Some of these, like the Carlyles, were handed down from the old days, sanctified with the reflected glamour of the past. Anny was fond of Jane Carlyle, but sometimes lost patience with Thomas. ‘At this moment I am ...”

“... kind proper to an artist. In The Golden Notebook and elsewhere, she mentions her admiration for Thomas Mann and for the idea of the philosophical novel, now, she believes, an impossibility; but even so she thinks one can still claim to be serious. Her right to make that claim is supported by her permanent interest in the world’s wickedness and ...”

“... man called Munro, went ashore to hunt deer on Saugor Island. Another member of the party, Captain Henry Conran, described what followed in a letter to a friend: About half past three we sat down on the edge of the jungle, to eat some cold meat sent us from the ship, and had just commenced our meal, when Mr Pyefinch and a black servant told us there was a fine ...”

“... Black Legend, which characterised Spain as a country of cruel and unenlightened Catholic zealots. Thomas Eakins visited Spain in 1869, followed later by John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassatt and others, bringing back visual and written descriptions of a country they thought both colourful and charming. The ‘Spanish craze’ reached epidemic proportions in the ...”

“... There’s your big six. Now get a life. When he wins (with his wife and producer Emma Thomas at his side), the engagingly modest Nolan will roll out the speech he knows by heart, about the Bomb as the great adventure and turning point of modern times, the exhilarating teamwork that gave us the big bang, and so on. The same attitude gave us ...”

“... of the upper classes, with his good temper and considerateness, his easy good manners and what Thomas Mann called his ‘boyhaft’ good looks. This affection, rarely reciprocated by English authors, goes back at least to the time of Herder and Goethe. Here is the Göttingen physicist and aphorist, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, writing in 1776, a quarter of ...”

“... it a strain: ‘He is not an easy man to be yourself with,’ Robert Louis Stevenson confessed to Henry James, ‘there is so much of him, and the veracity and the high athletic intellectual humbug are so intermixed.’ Hardy wrote loyally after Meredith’s death that ‘His words wing on – as live words will,’ but this was not to become the standard ...”

“... decades of American Independence, to its rise in the Revolution. Both Melville’s grandfathers, Thomas Melvill and Peter Gansevoort, were Revolutionary heroes – Thomas for being among the Sons of Liberty who defied the colonial tax-gatherers in the Boston Tea Party in 1773, Peter for withstanding a British siege in 1777 ...”

“... by feeding the insatiable hunger of the US military. DuPont was founded in 1802 at the behest of Thomas Jefferson to manufacture ‘black powder’ (a mixture of saltpetre, sulphur and charcoal) for the army. Over the next hundred years it specialised in gunpowder and explosives, until diversifying in the early 20th century into the production of other ...”

“... Great wits don’t always readily agree, and there was another on the scene in the person of Henry Cockburn, whose career and reputation show several points of similarity with Smith’s: the two did not quarrel, but he was to have more to do with Cockburn’s friend Jeffrey, editor of the Review. Jeffrey’s cockiness and scepticism were chided and ...”

“... Holkham is the immutable fact and she understands it entirely as it relates to her family. Thomas Coke (1697-1759), who commissioned the house, is introduced as the first earl in the fifth creation, but neither William Kent, who was largely responsible for the design, nor Capability Brown, who also worked at Holkham, merits a mention. The Codex ...”

“... presence in the world didn’t dim.Secularism, reason, scepticism don’t bring disenchantment, Thomas Laqueur argues in this monumental study, the harvest of more than ten years’ concentrated exploring of archives, tombstones, battlefields and furnace design. Laqueur principally scrutinises developments since around 1700, mostly in England, but he places ...”