“... in the last chapter reproductions of topographical drawings done in the last century by William Henry Holmes and Turner’s supposed student, Thomas Moran. They may be faulted on minutiae of physical detail, but Holmes’s sense of the material structure of the Canyon is uncanny, and Moran, had he been reproduced in ...”

“... platitudes, a civil servant mangling a story, a mime of minimal narrative competence which makes Thomas Mann’s bumbling Zeitblom look like Nabokov. ‘Insofar as the cliché can be used without irony,’ we read a little earlier, ‘he had become a respected literary voice.’ A cliché can’t be used without irony unless you forget it’s a cliché, and ...”

“... culture.’ I do not think that the Europe of Hildegard of Bingen, Ramon Llull, Meister Eckhart, Thomas à Kempis, Catherine of Siena, John of the Cross, Henry Vaughan, Blaise Pascal, George Fox, Jacob Boehme, Angelus Silesius, William Law, William Blake, William Wordsworth and Bernardette, among tens of thousands of ...”

“... September, rumours were rife in Conservative circles that he was not proving very good at the job. Henry Fairlie, for instance, was writing in the Spectator that ‘there is no point in concealing the fact that his first six months in office have not been encouraging.’ More and more criticisms were being made – ‘by those who know’ – of Eden’s ...”

“... at the beginning of the century. Partly, this may be explained in the words once written by Keith Thomas: ‘if magic is to be defined as the employment of ineffective techniques to allay anxiety when effective ones are not available, then we must recognise that no society will ever be free from it.’ Democratic politicians have eyes bigger than their ...”

“... then, at Norwich on 21 August, Elizabeth was for the first time publicly celebrated (by the poet Thomas Churchyard) as a Virgin Queen. The significance of this little piece of provincial theatre, a proposal not to marry, relates to the master-card in the 1578 strategy of appeasement: a royal match with the French King’s brother, Francois, Duke of Anjou. It ...”

“... a Committee for the Scientific Survey of Air Defence, chaired by the rector of Imperial College, Henry Tizard. For whatever reason – but probably because neither Tizard nor his chosen colleagues liked him – Lindemann wasn’t invited, and it took a grand remonstrance from Churchill to get him there. Now began some terrific rows. Lindemann resented the ...”

“... of 1857 had underlined. As Meyer and Brysac indicate, The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, directed by Henry Hathaway and released in 1935, was Hitler’s favourite film. (Mussolini’s Motion Picture Bureau banned it, deeming it to be pro-British propaganda.) Major Francis Yeats-Brown’s book, whose title the film borrowed, was a memoir of life as an officer in ...”

“... Compared with his closest American contemporaries, John Singer Sargent (also working in England), Thomas Eakins (determinedly homebound) and Mary Cassatt (moving between France and America), Whistler seems lightweight. He possessed neither Sargent’s bravura as a portraitist at the centre of the Anglo-American beau monde nor Eakins’s moral passion at the ...”

“... remain) or St James blackballer could wish: D.H. Lawrence (seven vols), Virginia Woolf (six vols), Thomas Hardy (seven vols) and Katherine Mansfield (four vols). The Conrad project, begun in 1983, is moving to its close with this, the sixth instalment of what will be an eight-volume set. These compilations are among the most expensive and least remunerative ...”

“... of 1928, a previously unknown painting turns up on the London art market. It belongs to a Major Henry Howard of Surrey. He is 45 years old. His father has just died and left him a large estate, and he’s selling off much of it – houses, land, family heirlooms. There are death duties; he has five young daughters and a marriage that’s going to end ...”

“... for whose empirical method Heinroth had considerable respect: William Perfect (1737-1809) and Thomas Arnold (1742-1816) particularly. (He, called William Perfect the ‘Nestor of English practitioners’.) Why then, the villainy? The answer is that, against the grain of the Enlightenment tradition which preceded him, Heinroth wished to restate, in a ...”

“... repertoire, because it can be made to speak to the adventures of Charles II. In much the same way, Henry V offers itself as a vehicle for the mediation of wartime trauma. In our own century, Olivier’s film addresses the Allied invasion of Normandy in 1944 and – perhaps more obliquely – Kenneth Branagh’s film engages with the current carnage of ...”

“... Laurence Binyon, Robert Bridges, Hall Caine, G.K. Chesterton, Arthur Conan Doyle, John Galsworthy, Thomas Hardy, Maurice Hewlett, Anthony Hope, W.J. Locke, E.V. Lucas, J.W. Mackail, John Masefield, A.E.W. Mason, Gilbert Murray, Henry Newbolt, Owen Seaman, G.M. Trevelyan, H.G. Wells and Israel Zangwill (Arthur Quiller-Couch ...”

“... Around him he gathered friends and like-minded acquaintances. His closest friend was the painter Henry Fuseli; his most notable protégés included Wordsworth and Mary Wollstonecraft. For decades, until Johnson’s death in 1809, they came in varying combinations to his weekly dinners, where the vitality of the conversation made up for the dullness of the ...”