“... told me she had read my book, The Apparitional Lesbian, and ‘agreed with me entirely’ about Henry James and The Bostonians. She made me describe at length how I’d met my then girlfriend. (‘She wrote you a letter! And you answered? Terry, I’m amazed! I get those letters all the time, but I would never answer one! Of course, Terry, I’m ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the Times, Lords Hailsham, Drogheda, Carrington, Goodman and Weinstock, and Messrs Roy Jenkins and James Prior, said they felt it was a good time, in view of the new publicity about the Ward case, to place on record their sense of admiration for the dignity and courage displayed by Mr and Mrs John Profumo and their family in the quarter-century since the ...”

“... manner highlighted to the point of overdetermination in the battle scene near York in Act II of Henry VI Part 2, when the stage is simultaneously occupied by a nameless father bearing the corpse of the son he has just killed, and a nameless son bearing the corpse of the father he has just killed, both of them watched by a king who, having inherited the ...”

“... where they do things differently, we may well ask whether we are abroad if we visit the England of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. In September 1528, Henry wrote to Anne: ‘No more to you at this present, mine own darling, for lack of time, but that I would you were in mine arms or I in yours, for I think it long since I kissed ...”

“... a greater role than has been realised, and Camden a correspondingly smaller one, in the story of James I’s attempt to commission a history of the reign of his mother, Mary Queen of Scots, which would exonerate her from complicity in the Darnley murder. Yet what evidence is there to support the assertions that Cotton ‘played an important part’ in ...”

“... In Modern Times York promises to tell ‘What’s Really Happening’ to everyone – not just Henry and Caroline. He still assumes that what’s happening is best explained in terms of style, and still concerns himself only with things that can raise a laugh, or at least a chuckle. But York is now looking at all of modern life as a single system of ...”

“... The final day of monastic life at Evesham witnessed the standard process of surrender by which Henry VIII’s government took possession of these ancient and supposedly perpetual corporations; but someone decided to add extra pointed drama to the occasion – probably the abbot himself, Philip Ballard alias Hawford (medieval Benedictines tended to acquire ...”

“... alarming, even as the witchfinder general. Peter Lorre was heartbreaking as a child murderer. James Gandolfini, playing an incorrigibly mean-minded godfather for seven years, strangely held on to the affection of most of his mass audience. James Cagney had his moments of deadpan nastiness, but there’s the mother ...”

“... of 1618, Diego Sarmiento de Acuna, Count of Gondomar, Ambassador of Philip III to the Court of James I had a clever idea. For four years the proposal that James’s son Prince Charles should marry the Infanta Maria had been batted to and fro between London and Madrid in an attempt to bring about an Anglo-Spanish ...”

“... and that we cannot always expect its intellectuals to approach us with the colonial cringe of Henry James or T.S. Eliot. Rorty made us realise how much poorer we are if Jefferson, Emerson, Whitman, Thoreau, Stowe, Peirce, William James, Santayana and Dewey are not familiar landmarks in our intellectual scenery. And ...”

“... private vendettas, had brought charges against the New York attorney general, Letitia James, who had investigated Trump for fraud.A recess was called and the chosen jurors were led off for lunch at the Silverado Buffet. I was looking for somewhere to have lunch myself when the judge fell in step with me. He seemed glad of my interest in his court ...”