“... Lives’. Since this is a historical romance set on the terrible island of Haiti, Baron Samedi, ‘lord of the graveyards’, is its presiding genius, and thousands of extras are dispatched with aplomb (‘The dead servant was carried away, the blood wiped off the marble floor; another slave girl was quickly produced, and she began to fan the air while Pauline ...”

“... But this must be all wrong; and not only for a comparatively modest talent like Hartley’s. Henry James, as artist, was well aware of what was involved. He teased a friend who interrogated him about the significance of The Turn of the Screw by pointing out that an artist is wiser never to define just what he means when he presents an enigmatically fraught ...”

“... be far better at home, but the mind wants a change. In several of Ian Fleming’s thrillers James Bond (who is much more interested in food and drink than in sex and killing people) derides the lyric menus of the American eatery, promising flaky-fresh sole and dawn-tender steak: he never orders anything with his bourbon but eggs benedict, or scrambled ...”

“... the publication of the first of the eight volumes of her History of England from the Accession of James I to that of the Brunswick Line in 1763 still remains largely unknown, as does the way she endured the social and intellectual obscurity that lasted from her controversial second marriage in 1778 to her death in a small Berkshire village in 1791. She had ...”

“... of steaming-hot intestine looping round you on the floor. I remember an interview with the late Lord Rees-Mogg where he told me at length ‘what mothers want’ without seemingly at any point wondering whether I might be a mother … Such people are quite fun to interview because you can suddenly prick their balloon with a rude question and watch them ...”

“... on gossip, rumour, etiquette and protocol, reputation and ego. In all of this William Cecil (later Lord Burghley) was the master. ‘The court hath the trees of paradise,’ he wrote in 1569, from which grew the knowledge of good and evil – courtiers could flourish or fail, and staying power counted. To make sense of the bubble in which Elizabeth and her ...”

“... When Basil Hallward completes his portrait of Dorian Gray in Wilde’s novel, Lord Henry Wotton says: ‘It is your best work, Basil, the best thing you have ever done. You must certainly send it next year to the Grosvenor. The Academy is too large and too vulgar. The Grosvenor is really the only place.’ Constance Lloyd’s grandmother ...”

“...  Henry James​ ’s novel The Princess Casamassima, which dramatises the world of stray revolutionaries in London in the 1880s, depends on energy coming from opposites. The novel’s protagonist, Hyacinth Robinson, appreciates beauty and feels excluded from the world of privilege around him. He lives an interior life ...”

“... In his quirky but compelling book on Burke, The Great Melody, Conor Cruise O’Brien fingers James Mill in his History of British India as one of the first to put the knife in. On the question of India, Mill says, Burke neither stretched his eye to the whole of the subject, nor did he carry its vision to the bottom. He was afraid. He was not a man to ...”

“... the Berlin-based Nazi propagandist William Joyce (an Irishman known to his British enemies as ‘Lord Haw-Haw’) about effective broadcasting techniques. Maintaining he was the authentic voice of ‘United States heritage’, he made clear his particular opposition to ‘Churchill and company’, who represented ‘usury ...”

“... to his studio with a snapshot of this young Galway woman who (he said) had eloped with his son James to Paris some eighteen years before. Mossy agreed to copy the photograph in oils, two feet by 18 inches, unframed, for the usual flat rate of five quid, ten bob down, the rest on delivery, asked the usual questions, colour of hair, auburn, colour of ...”

“... gardens at Cliveden in 1740, as the finale of the patriotic masque Alfred by Thomas Arne and James Thomson. The performance was part of a campaign by the self-styled Patriots to whip up support for the war against Spain. King Alfred was chosen as the subject as the purported founder of the British Navy, though there are other contenders for the ...”

“... settled on the tone he was to take throughout his life. He stayed on to study with William James, Josiah Royce and others in that golden age of American academic philosophising. He distinguished himself in his studies – and, in his attitude towards them, from his teachers. He began to sound a characteristic note of joyous disdain for ordinary ...”

“... analysis. The famous descriptions in Notes of the natural stone bridge over a branch of the James River, and of the passage of the Potomac through the Blue Ridge Mountains, establish the picturesque by means of cunningly juxtaposed evocations of the sublime and the beautiful. (The first of these terms, perhaps because American topography was supposed ...”

“... on your thin-bellied doublet like a rabbit on a spit’. Berowne speaks of Cupid as the ‘lord of folded arms’. In the tragedies and in the comedies, Shakespeare addresses the limitations of gesture, its inadequacy as a form of communication. Writers, unlike historians, tend to put quotation marks around gesture. In the margin of his copy of ...”