“... imperial school of geographers for whom all Western mapping of new territory was an exercise in power and control. Unfortunately he seeks to impose a simpler structure on his findings as he moves into the 20th century. His thesis is that the history of mapping shows the idea of the region changing and becoming more coherent, and that this process culminated ...”

“... Fountain is that he’s – depending on your point of view – a slow learner, a model of staying power and resilience, a maniacal perfectionist, or a living vindication of underachieving literary househusbands. That’s because the journalistic handle on him, established by Malcolm Gladwell in a New Yorker piece, is that he wrote fiction full-time for 18 ...”

“... run into Clayhanger, and (Wells again) The History of Mr Polly; perhaps the Antipodean outsider Henry Handel Richardson would have scooped it with The Getting of Wisdom. In 1924 Forster’s publishers might have thought they had a chance with his block-buster, A Passage to India. For once, Wells wasn’t dogging him: but there was Maurice Baring’s ...”

“... the formula … Ah, Larry, it isn’t that life is so short, it’s that it’s everlasting!’ Henry Miller wrote to Lawrence Durrell in 1959. The formula, if one were to look to history for clues, seems fairly simple. Be white, male, fairly imposing in stature, and in possession of a large ship and obedient crew. Mysteriously circle the coast of a remote ...”

“... corporation, treating it not without respect but concentrating on all the disagreements and power plays that went on inside the organisation. A study of this kind can’t be expected to offer any real sense of the ambition and gaiety of the whole enterprise, which was not so much a matter of infighting or even of po-faced educational endeavour as a ...”

“... The calm came under threat in the extraordinary year of 1830. There was a Tory government in power, whose prime minister was the hero of Waterloo, the Duke of Wellington. His attitude to democracy was summed up by his assertion that the people were ‘rotten to the core’. He was irritated in July 1830 by another revolution in France, which yet again ...”

“... Michael Baigent, who recently sued Brown’s publisher for plagiarism and lost. The third author, Henry Lincoln, didn’t sue. The book itself is mentioned in large capitals, and Teabing comments on it pedantically (‘their fundamental premise is sound’). Of course Brown was playing these games long before the case came up. Perhaps the two authors were ...”

“... she ‘enticed this small dog’ to mate with her and later produced puppies. In 1792, Lieutenant Henry Ball anchored the HMS Supply in Plymouth. It seems the ship was misnamed – supplies had been short on its latest voyage, and the crew had eaten some of the kangaroos they were carrying. Three unappetising ones survived, two of which were presented to ...”

“... heir to the great tradition of Dublin Protestant oratory which passes from Burke and Sheridan to Henry Grattan. Like his compatriot Charles Stewart Parnell, he took this reformist rhetoric into the highways and byways, as a street-corner speaker. There was nothing of the armchair socialist about him: he spent six years as a district councillor, serving on a ...”

“... monster’ and promptly glosses his term with the parenthesis that this is ‘the phrase that Henry James used in describing War and Peace’. It is conceded that Steinbeck does not always write well, but ‘Like Tolstoy, who also had little regard for style per se, he preferred literature that took a firm moral line and conveyed a message.’ Dyslexia is ...”

“... in Past and Present – and the style is allusive and at times opaque. But it illustrates well the power of Irish nationalists to manipulate myth. While Tone was transformed from a Whig into the symbol of Republican intransigence (‘break the connection’), and even of social radicalism (thanks to his appeal as a last resort to ‘the men of no ...”

“... further, or different, truth may lurk beneath, as a speculative and analytical biographer such as Henry James’s apostle, Leon Edel, has never hesitated to do. Although Kaplan speaks of the ‘risks’ that Carlyle believed a biographer should accept, he himself is cautious enough. He devotes his pages almost entirely to the outward events, chiefly ...”

“... strikingly successful example of such intimate reporting is provided by The House of Si Abd Allah. Henry Munson presents his story in a most original manner and it deserves to be read and enjoyed by all sorts of people who have no professional interest in anthropology. There are really three authors. The two principal narrators, both born in Tangier, are first ...”

“... wealth, not to mention a host of bottom-feeding hucksters and strongmen promising to restore power, riches, borders and often whiteness to one nation or another. Zahra did notice, however, and being a scholar of an era (interwar) and place (East Central Europe) plagued by bombastic, racist politicians and resentful publics, caught the resonances. This ...”

“... develop a scary, revelatory, toxic shimmer. The characters see in italics, like virgins out of Henry James, and then forget, so that we’re made to feel that only the story itself, with its irony and vertiginous impersonality, preserves their vision. Eisenberg’s craft is underlined by the fact that she covers the same sort of ground as the ...”