“... fact of the new century: industrial momentum. ‘Prosperity never before imagined,’ Henry Adams wrote in 1907, ‘power never yet wielded by man, speed never reached by anything but a meteor, had made the world irritable, nervous, querulous, unreasonable and afraid.’ Motion pictures – 24 projected frames a second which gave the illusion ...”

“... Boswell and Samuel Johnson visited Pembroke College, Oxford and called on the master, William Adams. According to Richard Sher, Boswell wrote in his journal how dismayed he had been to see in the master’s library a copy of the quarto edition of David Hume’s Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects of 1758, handsomely bound in morocco leather. Boswell ...”

“... don’t know her till you have seen her as builder and restorer, designer, decorator, gardener,’ Henry James wrote to another impassioned interior decorator, their mutual friend Mary Hunter, in 1913. At the time, Wharton was contemplating the purchase of a substantial estate near where Hunter lived in Essex; but while this came to nothing, the novelist’s ...”

“... Truman (1992) was on the bestseller lists for the better part of a year, and his John Adams (2001) is providing an astonishing repeat performance. Robert Caro’s dramatically detailed look at The Years of Lyndon Johnson has been unfolding since 1982, and large chunks of Volume Three have been serialised in the New Yorker. In the meantime, Robert ...”

“... have been the better for that is more doubtful. There is a more radical point in the remark to Henry Newbolt that ‘no man ever wrote himself out if he goes on living as he lived when he first began to write. It is the other thing, the social consequence of his first works, that does the mischief, – if he lets it.’ One could put many glosses on ...”

“... Rats had already been used for some time to teach dissection in European medical schools, and Henry Donaldson, a neurologist at the Wistar Institute who had been searching for an animal for his own experiments, thought Rattus norvegicus might be suitable.In 1909 Donaldson’s colleague Helen King began to breed rats, selecting offspring for their docility ...”

“... surfaces like the Kraken; the poem is here a Mort and there a Morte. Max Beerbohm’s parody of Henry James is readily and roughly transcribed: for ‘caught in her tone’, read ‘caught her tone’; for ‘feverish’, read ‘feverishly’; for ‘physically’, read ‘psychically’ ... Mis-spelling, mis-punctuation and misquoting are much in ...”

“... which he will watch tournaments taking place on the far side of the world. Gibson’s guide, Mr Adams, is soon on the spot, and, glancing at the digital watch embedded in his signet ring, announces that dinner will shortly be served. After-dinner conversation turns at once to golf. Adams, who holds the post of Chief ...”

“... the British cinematic imagination can be seen in the differences between Tony Richardson’s two Henry Fielding adaptations, Tom Jones (1963) and Joseph Andrews (1977). Both films are, for the most part, faithful to the spirit of their source novels, but in one extended sequence, Joseph Andrews offers a glaring exception. In Book III, Chapter 7 of the ...”

“... to the writing-school circuit as a teacher and collected numerous National Magazine and O. Henry Awards. Each story in his second collection, Pastoralia (2000), was first published in the New Yorker. Saunders’s employment history is worth sketching out because his vision of America and the American workplace could easily be mistaken for something ...”

“... it should have some ‘chastening influence … on the self-confidence of mankind’, and Henry Adams likened the news to the foundering of the Republican Party: ‘the sum and triumph of civilisation … our greatest achievement sinks at a touch … Nature jeers at us for our folly.’ The sinking of the Titanic very quickly seemed freighted ...”

“... debt. European involvement in the Egyptian economy steadily increased: the American economist Henry Carter Adams believed the commission was so powerful it was becoming the ‘practical dictator of Egypt’. This exercise of ‘soft’ imperialism led to a nationalist rebellion, British military intervention and the ...”

“... of the fragment and then an attempt to complete and translate it. The book’s author, Charles Adams, may have been trying to compensate for the flimsy plot. Twin girls, who share a psychic ability to feel each other’s pain, are separated as children when the younger, Catherine, is stolen by Gypsies. The elder, Gertie, grows up and gets married but is ...”

“... have all these 18 to 25 year olds who are new to the political scene, and they think that Adams and McGuinness are doing a good job. It doesn’t seem to matter what Sinn Féin do, their vote stays. What can the SDLP do now? We don’t need guns, we’re not robbing banks. We don’t have millions of pounds behind us. We don’t wear three-piece ...”

“... queens (Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard). He spent four years of his youth as the companion of Henry VIII’s illegitimate son Henry Fitzroy. Howard blood was blue enough to pose a threat to the succession, as Surrey’s uncle Thomas discovered when he was imprisoned in 1536 after a rash engagement to Lady Margaret ...”