“... Reed. The Beats were now heritage fodder, a potential Bloomsbury group. There was even talk of James Ivory optioning a Neal Cassady property. I wondered, thinking of Blake’s formative experiences there, whether Carolyn had caught any of Alan Bennett’s Westminster Abbey footage? Bennett, required to audition for the John Betjeman slot, couldn’t bring ...”

“... to be said about this beyond that Trevelyan ran a very good front-line ambulance service, though Henry James, a close family friend, perhaps rather overdid it when he wrote: ‘I think incessantly of George and yearn over him ... and in fact figure him as the backbone, quite, of that long and in some ways perhaps rather limp peninsula.’ Trevelyan’s ...”

“... on it small room for such wilful characters as we are familiar with in Balzac, or Stendhal, or Henry James, or Mark Twain. Malraux went so far as to say that Faulkner conceived his situations in a void without thinking of any character at all, pre-imagining ‘l’écrasement des personnages inconnus’. By writing in terms of myth or saga he evaded ...”

“... demanded absolute freedom. Hemingway must have seen himself as rather like the writers about whom Henry James liked to expand, men who recognised marriage as fatal to art but who couldn’t always manage without it. There is just a touch of updated Yellow Book about Hemingway’s marital history. He even turned against men friends when he thought the ...”

“... there is the artist’s conscience, the duty to make sense of it all, the pressure of form as Henry James apprehended it: ‘really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so.’ In ‘Primer ...”

“... discrimination – that between the supremely feminine great novelist who meant so much to both Henry James and D.H. Lawrence and the ‘normally’ noble Victorian woman-intellectual who, as such, was capable of exemplifying a weaker kind of feminity. It would have been to end with an insistence that the Hebraising Deronda of the fullDeronda-theme was ...”

“... In 1905 a British journalist called James Dodds Henry travelled to Baku, an enclave on the southern frontier of the Russian Empire that had recently become the centre of the world oil industry. ‘If oil is king, Baku is its throne,’ he wrote in Baku: An Eventful History. But the Russian industry was even then beginning a precipitous decline following a series of crippling strikes in the oilfields led by a young Joseph Stalin, and rebellion was spreading across the Caucasus ...”

“... artist should wish to settle either in Paris or London.’ Then, of course, it was another matter. James, Whistler, Sargent, Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Stephen Crane, Harold Frederick, Henry Harland of the Yellow Book, Pound, Eliot, Frost; from 1894 to 1914 it seems that all the crème, not to mention the avant garde, of ...”

“... isolation on the world stage. After the break with Rome, complete by 1534, England stood alone. Henry VIII’s imperial claims, couched in Thomas Cromwell’s majestic legalese, were introspective, asserting the power of the monarch freed from the constraints of papal rule. The economy was beset by inflation, there were land shortages and there was growing ...”

“... The quatercentenary commemorative King James Bible (KJB) sits on my desk as I write: a satisfying artefact in its chocolate livery enriched by opulently gilded top, tail and fore edges, with stout chocolate slipcase to match, impressive in its folio bulk, though not nearly as bulky as the originals of 1611, which needed a sturdy lectern to bear them, announcing their presence with a swagger equal to the most majestic of England’s medieval church buildings ...”

“... system for a generation is about to hit the headlines again. Some time in the next few weeks Baden Henry Skitt, former Scotland Yard Commander and Chief Constable of Hertfordshire, now a chief investigator for the Criminal Cases Review Commission, will draft a public statement on the A6 murder, for which James Hanratty was ...”

“... Drum was a magazine written by Blacks and ‘Non-Whites’, by what Drum’s finest reporter, Henry Nxumalo, who declared he was fed-up with these negative appellations, asked his readers to settle for: ‘The old contemptibles – Kaffirs, Coolies and Hot’nots. How’s that?’ It flourished under impossible conditions, and made the careers of a group ...”

“... old girlfriend, or rather an old lust, since this is how the women are chiefly celebrated – what Henry Bech, in the story ‘His Oeuvre’, remembers as ‘the most marvellous lay of his life’. Bech’s crudity is not just his own, unfortunately. Of course, the prose trusses things in very pretty ribbons, but the hard, coarse, primitive, misogynistic ...”

“... Before I got to the fourth and latest book in the exhausted but inexhaustible Henry Root corpus, I allowed myself some shallow research on his previous works. The first was memorable enough, even without the help of a library. The Henry Root Letters was not so much a work of tenacious parody or stomping satire as a pretty good leg-pull: which may be why the London Review of Books, when the letters were published in 1979, called them ‘a disgrace to publishing ...”

“... it had taken up a new role, as a law student at Lincoln’s Inn. (Donne and his younger brother, Henry, began their studies at Oxford, and may have spent time at Cambridge, but there was a law barring Catholics from formal admission to the ranks of either university.) At Lincoln’s Inn, Donne quickly established a reputation for himself, not as a carefully ...”