“... only one further meeting. Just after the opening of An Ideal Husband to great notices (though Henry James hated it), Wilde bumps into Conan Doyle and asks him if he’s seen the play. Conan Doyle hasn’t. Wilde said with a grave face: ‘Ah you must go. It is wonderful. It is genius!’ And Conan Doyle thinks he’s gone mad. He’s never seen ...”

“... to the failure of the Amicable Grant of 1525. This unfortunately-named levy was designed to allow Henry VIII to take advantage of the defeat and capture of the King of France to prosecute his French claims. The title was not just a piece of newspeak: it expressed a crucial ambiguity in Late Medieval constitutional thinking. The King must not tax without ...”

“... Crown and the storm centre of the war was in northern France. In April 1589, the French King Henry III, who had had the Catholic League’s leaders assassinated, joined forces with Henry of Navarre and the Huguenots in bringing down the forces of the League. But Henry III was himself ...”

“... the course of his research, Bannister struck up a correspondence with Montague Rhodes James. Though he is now more famous for his ghost stories, M.R. James was one of the most important medievalists of his time. He had an eye for a sharp detail: privately he described Bannister as a ‘good sort’, but ‘with ...”

“... The potato, which was to end it for all but fussy eaters, still awaited general adoption. But James Lind, in his definitive work on the causation of the disease, a work to which the author refers, points out the error of what she is here doing, a common medical sin of his day – that of attributing to it almost every type of lesion. Highlanders had a ...”

“... of coin shops and Korean grocers, ice cream parlours, language schools and camera shops. James Smith and Sons’ Umbrellas is the only one people remember. The area has never become obsolete, or not quite – there are shifts with changing tastes – but it has remained undefined: a little shabby, a little trashy, bordered by the genteel to the north ...”

“... in 1788 around Linnaeus’s remarkable botanical collection, which was purchased for £1000 by James Edward Smith in 1783 and brought to London over the protest of all Swedish science. By the beginning of the Victorian era, the amateur tradition of the country naturalist and nature-appreciator – a tradition given great dignity and prestige by Gilbert ...”

“... from Franciscan ‘grey friars’ and Carmelite ‘white friars’. The monastery was dissolved by Henry VIII in 1538, whereupon its five-acre precinct became a prime piece of Tudor real estate. Chris Laoutaris’s Shakespeare and the Countess gives a remarkably detailed account of its residents in the 1590s, some of them very distinguished, and of their ...”

“... wife’ does not. Amidon’s story, ‘Echolocation’, turns out to be about a man called Henry Keating who also has a wife: ‘Henry made his wife take out the trash, even on nights she worked overtime.’ Henry’s wife has the edge over Martin Amis’s wife, in that she gets to ...”

“... Fanny has had a long gestation. In 1961, as an undergraduate, she was taught by the late Professor James L. Clifford, Johnson’s biographer, who had the admirable policy of inviting his class to imitate an 18th-century author instead of writing yet another academic paper on him. At the time, Ms Jong came up with a mock epic in heroic couplets in the manner of ...”

“... the kind of people who don’t flower Until their shrivelled roots taste fame and power. Take Henry Kissinger as an example. The man personifies megalomania. He’s back in action with another sample Of foreign policy from Ruritania. On Poland Reagan’s harsh words have been ample But Henry hankers after something ...”

“... written the fiction his criticism desires. A list of the weaknesses of English fiction since, say, Henry Green would go like this: it has produced few characters of depth or life (only Mr Biswas, Jean Brodie and John Self in almost forty years); it has been grossly, childishly explicit with symbol and allegory (Golding, Carter); the freedom of its characters ...”

“... a Dostoevsky novel,’ a place full of ‘the imagination of disaster’ – the phrase comes from Henry James – and not just the imagination, we might add. In this light, Trilling then says, we may feel that Tolstoy ‘gives us, after all, not reality itself but a sort of idyll of reality’. This is very intriguing, and a long way – too ...”

“... Florian. It’s surprising they didn’t think to use ‘Vorsprung durch technik’ as a slogan before Audi did: ‘Advancement through Technology’ is Kraftwerk to a T.We never quite get a sense, from Uwe Schütte’s account of this cusp moment in Kraftwerk: Future Music from Germany, of how or why Hütter and Schneider took their new pan-European direction ...”

“... typed out her favourite Hemingway sentences to see how they worked, Later, at Berkeley, she put Henry James and Joseph Conrad on a pedestal with Hemingway and agonised in a short story class with Mark Schorer that she was ‘not good enough’. The 1950s were the glory days of the New Criticism in university English departments, but Didion rejected ...”