“... variously and with high composure, that there is something more primary than enlightenment. Henry James said of Eugénie de Guérin and her piety, what could not be said of Heaney and his, that she ‘was certainly not enlightened’. Yet when James went on, ‘But she was better than this – she was light itself,’ the ...”

“... evidence Franklin cites – tucked away in a footnote – is a payment by her publisher James Dodsley to ‘G. 20 pounds for Hartly House, Calcutta’. There was also Gibbes’s known connection to India through her son. Frustratingly, Franklin never addresses this question directly. His jargon-heavy introduction reads far more like a specialist ...”

“... The recipient of the following letter was Sir James Hayes-Sadler, Governor of the East African Protectorate (soon to become known as the Colony of Kenya). Its author was a British settler writing from Nyeri, in the colony’s newly established ‘white highlands’. The year was 1908.            Dear Sir James Sadler,      A grave matter has occurred here ...”

“... House’s ‘Special’ The Falkland Islands Dispute – International Dimensions Professor James Fawcett agrees on line 3 that ‘the determination of territorial title, when it is disputed, is a complex issue of fact and law,’ and asserts on line 31 that ‘the territorial title to the islands... must be accorded to the United Kingdom.’ On this ...”

“... Decision, which was taken to have outlawed slavery on English soil. In 1787, Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce began their campaign against the slave trade. Parliament eventually voted to end the trade in 1807; the United States followed suit in 1808. Slavery in the British West Indies was abolished in 1834, and even the tenacious slave system of the ...”

“... him. ‘It vexed me that even on the festival of Christmas I was melancholy. I went with my son James to St George’s, Hanover Square, and had some elevation of heart in that hallowed dome. Saw Miss Upton at a distance’ – then back to the family turkey in Great Portland Street. The content of this last journal – previewed in the account of ...”

“... with her writer parents and the people she met in their living room in New York: Edmund Wilson, James Thurber, Walker Evans, James M. Cain, Nunnally Johnson, S.J. Perelman, Dawn Powell, Joseph Mitchell and John O’Hara. Many of these celebrated figures, artists and authors approaching fifty at the start of the decade or ...”

“... the mercantile air’. Here Sandage becomes a master sleuth. For example, he introduces us to Dr William Henry Brisbane, who enters the Mercantile Agency’s books in 1844 as a go-ahead fellow with $22,000 and 100 acres of land. Two years later, a second entry dramatically revises the bottom line. Brisbane, it turned out, had inherited $100,000 and quickly ...”

“... are, how limited agency often is, how contingent, opportunistic and unpredictable change can be. William Morris’s words might resonate with Bevins’s Brazilian protesters: ‘Men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to ...”

“... of the world’s ten largest banks and the 21 largest financial institutions are also Japanese. As William Horsley and Roger Buckley observe in their vivid review of the past 45 years, it is not surprising that by 1983, the Japanese prime minister had come in from the edge of the photographs that are taken at the end of international summits and was seen ...”

“... of Pat Buchanan, the neolithic challenger to George Bush’s renomination in 1992, and William Buckley, the acidulous Catholic pundit, while making us uncomfortable about longstanding liberal assumptions? This brief volume is not an intellectual ‘life review’, to borrow a gerontological term, but a solemn reflection on the philosophical ...”

“... bodies. Their offices became more substantial and their relations with their clients more formal. William Kent, Lord Burlington’s house-guest for most of his life, stands on the pre-professional side of the divide: Sir John Soane, architect of the Bank of England, professor of architecture at the Royal Academy, on the post-professional side. The careers ...”

“... in a ten-year-old American translation, printed in Great Britain but not otherwise Anglicised. William Hannaher’s translation is particularly effective in its rendering of the author’s virtuoso gifts of metaphor and simile. Kis’s style highlights not only Eduard’s grand visionary projects but the most mundane experiences and objects, from the ...”

“... as being at once too ‘plotless’ (or, as Washington Irving put it – before Cooper, Hawthorne, James and others – too lacking in ‘association’) and ‘stiflingly, even obsessively over-plotted’. There is a relationship, in Fender’s reading of American literature, between plotting and landscape which can be ...”

“... of Architecture came out in 1849. By the time he met Ruskin seven years later, he was a friend of William Morris and the junior Pre-Raphaelites and destined for a career bound up though never identifiable with their circle. From the beginning there is a wary sobriety about Webb, at variance with the antics and impulsiveness of Morris and Rossetti. Some of ...”