“... Florine Stettheimer​ was a rich New Yorker who found artistic inspiration in Europe, like a Henry James heroine, looking at Old Masters and Rococo interiors. One of her early paintings riffs on Botticelli’s Primavera: Stettheimer thought his Flora was ‘too fat to move’. Her Spring (1907) shows a slim, nonchalant woman in a powdered wig, flutter sleeves and high heels, attended by squirrels and ferrets and showing a lot of leg ...”

“... against the grain of his own transcendentalism. ‘I am a passionately religious man,’ he told Edward Garnett in April 1914, as he was completing ‘The Wedding Ring’, an early version of The Rainbow and Women in Love, ‘and my novels must be written from the depth of my religious experience.’ But it remains at least possible that his religious ...”

“... appears to be a paradox. Of course it would be people like Mundt, and people like the demented James Jesus Angleton, who guessed the truth about Hoover and fought filthy, frightened, secret turf-wars with him. Angleton, indeed, was the surreptitious circulator of the photograph that purportedly showed Hoover administering a languorous blow-job. This ...”

“... woman he loved. Her ideas of their relationship counted for nothing against his will. Both Henry James and Choderlos de Laclos would have deeply admired the skill with which Lawrence exploited his apparent powerlessness in the face of three amoral but powerful and realistic women – Frau von Richthofen and her two daughters – scheming to give him his ...”

“... did not want to ask that question. For him, as he says in Literature and Western Man, Henry James was a writer who had no substance, no gusto, no power of living, ‘as if a ghost should write better than a man’. The more fully and robustly he lived, the better the author. Look at Hemingway. Priestley’s misapprehension came not only from what he ...”

“... even masts, and with captured cordage. This authority did not come from his being a nobleman – James Cook had as much or more, and his father was a farm labourer. It was rather a matter of size, spiritual size, vast stores of animal spirits and eagerness for battle, great professional ability, even physical bulk – he ate far, far too much and he was ...”

“... anything to do with the Nazis was as damaging to the nation’s soul as anything alleged against Edward VIII. Wodehouse had been an emblem of Britishness for the smug, Daily Telegraph elements in the United Kingdom: his work was ‘the sort of thing foreigners don’t understand’ – like cricket, Gilbert and Sullivan. Malcolm Muggeridge has told an ...”

“... 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 her ...”

“... smallest police station (a plinth in Trafalgar Square), its first Greek Revival building (James Stuart’s Doric temple of 1758 at Hagley Park) and Temple Bar (in its present situation in a Hertfordshire wood) are all follies by Headley’s and Meulencamp’s definition. The first, like many of their eye-catchers and shams, is not quite what it ...”

“... Edward Jones – the Burne came later – was born in Birmingham to a mother who died giving birth to him and a father who eked out a living as a frame-maker, although art, his son reported, ‘was always a great bewilderment to him’. The only person who seems to have recognised the boy’s talent – a neighbour who bought pictures to rework – had the dubious merit of having once painted stormy waves over a calm harbour scene by Turner ...”

“... expert on the windmills of Nottinghamshire in 1951, to Rosemary Cook, who rubbed the brass of Sir Edward Grey for the Staffordshire volume.So as the series developed it took on some of the colouring of the local antiquarian tradition. It was a successor not only to Dehio but also to Britton and Brayley’s early 19th-century series, The Beauties of England ...”

“... wanted grand writing – one thinks of Parry’s ‘I was glad’, written for the coronation of Edward VII in 1902 – there were composers good enough to provide it. There was a coming together from 1870 onwards of the music that was being written for Anglican services, the attitude of the authorities to it and the social standing of the composers ...”

“... three young officers she loved – Victor Richardson, Geoffrey Thurlow and her younger brother, Edward, all killed in action. When one reads Brittain’s diary, it is hard not to resent the way Leighton cut across the natural line of her development. In the early entries, despite some priggishness and superior airs, she cuts a very appealing figure. She ...”

“... stood virtually unopposed until 1956 and the passing of the Restrictive Trade Practices Act. With Edward Heath’s wholesale assault on retail price maintenance the NBA again came under attack. In June 1962 the book trade presented its case for exemption to the Restrictive Practices Court. The 24 days of testimony, in which the century-old arguments were ...”

“... been taken on board in Britain: they engage with a post-Poundian poetic tradition (Charles Olson, Edward Dorn, Robert Duncan, George Oppen) of a kind that gives modern American poetry its variety and experimentalism. Gunn and Davie are included in both anthologies, but to read their collected poems (the next step after reading Davie’s superb ‘Time ...”