“... Patrick Bateman kills a girlfriend, apparently because she thought that his suit was designed by Henry Stuart rather than Giorgio Armani. This reduces murder to the merely satirical. A motive and an action are set up against each other in a way that says, without very much intelligence or subtlety: ‘These are the motives which this society says matter and ...”

“... on Elizabeth’s life. Young Bess had Jean Simmons in the lead. Hemmed in by Stewart Granger as Thomas Seymour and Charles Laughton reprising his prewar role as Henry VIII, there isn’t much Simmons can do beyond tossing her hair and striking a curious hands-on-hips Holbeinesque pose to suggest that there is more to her ...”

“... grumbling about the lighting of paintings in Venice for some time. These include John Ruskin and Henry James, who, Mamoli Zorzi writes, ‘fell in love with the paintings in San Rocco despite not being able to see them properly’. Ruskin wrote that the three halls in San Rocco were ‘so badly lighted, in consequence of the admirable arrangements of the ...”

“... chapter makes no mention of the alternative line of Dickens biography that descends through Thomas Wright and Katherine Longley to our contemporaries Peter Ackroyd and Claire Tomalin. In his chapter on James Joyce Hamilton dwells exclusively on the author’s ‘patron saint’, Harriet Weaver. Surprisingly – for a study whose main concern is the ...”

“... One will look at the books in the rack with a new respect now that one knows their origins in Henry James and Nietzsche. The principle on which Mills & Boon runs its list is that the imprint is always greater than the author. Over the years, the firm has built up a stable of romancers several of whom (like Jean S. Macleod) have a hundred or more titles to ...”

“... and persistence of the satire that undercut the successive fashions in chivalric enthusiasm. Thomas Love Peacock’s Mr Chainmail in Crotchet Castle, ‘a good-looking young gentleman ... with very antiquated taste’, who ‘holds that the best state of society was that of the 12th century, when nothing was going forward but fighting, feasting and ...”

“... The Medici Venus was admired, as the Cnidian statue had been, in alarming ways. The bibliophile Henry George Quin, for instance, records in his diary (extracts of which were published in an amusing article by Arthur Rau in the Book Collector in 1964) how, in the winter of 1785, he ‘stole’ into the Tribuna of the Uffizi in Florence when no one was there ...”

“... greatness and purpose, through the values elicited from the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales and Henry IV Part One, Keats’s Odes and Tom Jones, Emma and Tess. It is still happening, even after we have got historians to stop drilling them in the battles we won, and when geographers no longer offer them maps in which the Empire is coloured red. Penguin ...”

“... keeping both convention and character at bay, leaving these threatening things to those who, like Thomas and Anna Quayne, Portia’s stepbrother and sister, have succumbed in the coldly defeated world of being themselves. To be young is to have none of the story – the stigmata – by which the adults are inexorably ‘placed’. For his elders, the amoral ...”

“... hit on the answer: it is just that he has been unable to convince all his colleagues of it. Henry Gee has written an excellent book explaining why this is so. To begin with, the problem of animal relationships is a tough one. The major animal phyla, including the vertebrates, are very ancient: at least 545 million years old – the beginning of the ...”

“... involve him with a villain called Richard Craufurd, whom Bulwer-Lytton based on the banker Henry Fauntleroy, who had been hanged for forgery before a crowd of 100,000 people at Newgate in 1824. The central male figure in Lucretia is an artist, murderer and forger called Gabriel Varney, who was reworked from elements in the life of the forger-poisoner ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”