“... like most mortals, have scarcely been individuals of unimpeachable character – King John? Henry VIII? James II? Compared with many previous sovereigns, the failings of the Windsors which Kelley describes with such evident relish seem relatively harmless, and exactly what one might expect of any isolated, privileged, undereducated, self-indulgent royal ...”

“... and those which invite or allow us to imagine what is beyond them, and what it is beyond their power to represent. This opposition is set up in essay after essay, as the permeability of a favoured work or form of art is contrasted with the merely flat or the treacherously reflective, or with the complacency that comes with plentitude. It works also as an ...”

“... to find themselves accused of complicity in the hegemonic operations of an oppressive structure of power. Once among the cosiest and most genteel of subjects, academic art history entered on a period of protracted and divisive confrontation. The initial phase of hostilities was largely driven by a scattering of younger scholars on the radical left, whose views ...”

“... patients call them ‘sir’. They gave extravagant dinners and patronised the arts: the young Henry Wood owed a good deal to the physician George Cathcart. If they were exceptionally well-connected like ‘Tommy’, Lord Horder, they bought their Rolls-Royces from former prime ministers. Where, historians are now asking, is the historical cunning which ...”

“... how we read. With certain other books it makes no sense to separate text from object: part of the power of the Book of Kells or the Lindisfarne Gospels or the artists’ books of Dieter Roth or Ed Ruscha is precisely that they raise and then refuse a distinction between literary and material form.When Nineveh was destroyed in 612 BCE, the flames that swept ...”

“... father, had found his public career ruined because of an indiscreet allusion to the subject. Henry Fawcett, the political economist and Liberal cabinet minister, refused to testify for fear that he would have to reveal Mill’s private attitude to the question and Mrs Fawcett objected that it would only subject women even further to men’s desires. The ...”

“... Hudson in the early years of the century, and, a generation later, counsellor to the 24-year-old Henry Green, who rewrote Blindness in accordance with Garnett’s advice, and many years later attributed to his adviser ‘almost any original idea’ he had gained about how to write novels. Yet it would be misleading to think of Garnett as the natural champion ...”

“... brain development. At four, another doctor found the child ‘nervous and excitable with little power of sustained action in any direction’. His governess, Lady Lyttelton, lamented his ‘passions and stampings’ and inclination to hurl his books and sit under the table. Victoria and Albert’s solution was a heavily timetabled regime, modelled on ...”

“... of the German Military Attaché’s wastepaper basket and hand them surreptitiously to Commandant Henry, gave Henry the original incriminating document on 26 September 1894, and that Henry communicated the news of this discovery to his superiors the next day, it is remarkable that nothing ...”

“... of voice.’ If Bagehot knew that ‘the lecture of a professor’ was not his natural medium, Henry Sidgwick knew no other, unless it were sitting in his study, grinding out the ‘632 rather closely printed octavo pages’ of The Elements of Politics, with the sapping doubt as to whether it was worthwhile in one half of his mind, and in the other the ...”

“... humanity or justice those original occupants might have is a question that remains to be answered. Henry Reynolds, in his books The Other Side of the Frontier (1981) and Frontier (1987), argues that war, though undeclared, was indeed waged. For both sides, Aboriginal invisibility was a key, rendering white atrocities unaccountable but also hiding the guerrilla ...”

“... Mayor and Sheriffs of London invited 60 guests to watch the execution in Newgate Prison yard of Henry Wainwright, a prosperous brush-maker who had shot and dismembered his bigamous wife. The scene, according to an eye-witness, was absolutely Hogarthian and horrible, the cold December morning, the waning moon, the rope dangling to and fro in the shed ...”

“... he continued in the government as foreign secretary after the coup that brought Lloyd George to power. Churchill commented sourly: ‘He passed from one cabinet to the other, from the prime minister who was his champion to the prime minister who had been his most severe critic, like a powerful, graceful cat walking delicately and unsoiled across a rather ...”

“... dropped his pen to whack golf balls, flick fishing rods or browse the bookstalls by the Seine (Henry James thought that Lang was too ‘insular and innocent’ to appreciate Paris). But he could only afford to be interested in a topic for the time it took to dash off an article about it. As Oxonian contemporaries racked up professorships, he became an aged ...”

“... and another ‘byrde of America’, possibly a blond-crested woodpecker from Amazonia. In 1569, Henry VIII’s former barber-surgeon, Edmund Harman, erected a monument to his family in the parish church at Burford in Oxfordshire, with his sixteen children kneeling at the base beneath four naked figures, believed to be likenesses of Tupinambà ...”