“... glamour and splendour. Among the more solid figures who appear on this stage from time to time are Thomas Hardy, visited more than once in Dorchester: Tea at Max Gate. Lady Stacie there, a descendant of R.B. Sheridan – and a fashionable lady, formerly a great beauty. She gushed to T.H. about his novels at the tea-table. He shut her up by saying ‘I am not ...”

“... for more than twenty years now. The name, at once plain and elusive, might have appealed to Henry James. The echoes of ‘maiden’ and ‘evading’ are particularly apposite, for despite starting her sexual life at the age of 13, Kate remains virginal in a more important sense, never fully giving herself to anyone, always holding back from any ...”

“... and potential employer, Cosimo de’ Medici. The same day, the English ambassador to Venice, Sir Henry Wotton, sent a copy to James I, describing it as ‘the strangest piece of news (as I may justly call it)’ that he would ever have received ‘from any part of the world’. Most copies were probably sent over the Alps by Tommaso Baglioni, the book’s ...”

“... by stagecoach). Many were perennially ‘briefless barristers’, as Austen’s lawyer nephew Henry put it, ‘haunted’ every day by the refrain of their desperate clerks: ‘I should be glad, sir, of some work.’Discussions of social mobility during this period have tended to focus on movement up the scale. For struggling younger sons from ...”

“... it’s our move.’ It was then that Nixon said he decided ‘to give Allende the hook’. Henry Kissinger returned to a pre-FDR maturity/immaturity test of sovereignty to justify Allende’s ousting: ‘I don’t see,’ he said, ‘why we need to stand idly by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.’ 26. The ...”

“... plantation to be shared out between the dead man’s relatives.In 1834, Douglass’s new master, Thomas Auld, a mean ‘object of contempt’, believing his authority was being challenged by his insolent teenage slave, handed him over ‘to be broken’ by an overseer called Edward Covey. ‘Mr Covey succeeded in breaking me,’ Douglass wrote, ‘in ...”

“... questions of quality and value. This, once more, is a thoroughly traditional moral project, which Thomas Aquinas would have had no trouble in recognising. Moralism and idealism must be refuted, and the question of what we ought to do must somehow be anchored in the way it is with us. But the spectre of reductionism is not simple to exorcise, and it is easier ...”

“... and a puzzle, since it should appeal to an English-speaking public addicted to Jane Austen and Henry James, with both of whom Fontane has many broad similarities. At 17, Effi is married off to the civil servant Baron Geert von Innstetten, whom her mother once loved but rejected in order to marry Effi’s father, a man of higher rank. Effi is pleased with ...”

“... There was even a novel set among foreign music students in Leipzig: Maurice Guest (1908) by Henry Handel Richardson (the pseudonym of the Australian writer Ethel Richardson). The Weimar Republic was a ‘great crossroads of modernism’, where cultural innovators from many countries mingled, experimented and lived in defiance of convention. All this was ...”

“... indeed, a Spanish twist is an unlikely but integral feature of many of Sibelius’s tunes. Henry T. Parker’s Boston Evening Transcript review of the Fifth Symphony’s 1922 première in that city is worth attention for its handsome flush of Sibelius enthusiasm, presaging, as Tawaststjerna points out that of Cecil Gray, Gerald Abraham and Constant ...”

“... been misleadingly retitled The Drover’s Wife and Other Stories after Bail’s appropriation of Henry Lawson’s 1892 classic. Bail approaches Lawson’s ‘The Drover’s Wife’ through Russell Drysdale’s well-known painting of the same name. In Lawson, the wife finds a strength of her own while maintaining a firm sense of connection with her absent ...”

“... She lives, Master Shallow. The italicised words, found in the Folio, are not in the Quarto of Henry IV, published in 1600 – a text almost certainly derived from Shakespeare’s autograph. The fuller text can therefore be taken either as evidence of revision, or as suggesting that the printers of the Quarto for some reason omitted the italicised ...”

“... to this? Early on, Howe focuses on the key figure of Edward Wilmot Blyden, who was born in St Thomas in the West Indies in 1832 but lived much of his life in Sierra Leone. Even before the European Scramble for Africa, Blyden formulated the essential problem faced by people of African descent. Should they argue that they are identical with Europeans but ...”

“... king’. Both kings and cockneys, he felt, were very objectionable neighbours in a hotel. Henry James thought the new breed of tourists were ‘rarely, to judge by their faces and talk, children of light to any eminent degree’. Another huge embarrassment was the female mountaineer, sometimes wearing breeches, a sight to attract a hail of stones. Up ...”

“... Bayreuth. In 1924, the Wagners went on a fund-raising trip to America, during which they solicited Henry Ford’s aid for Hitler while at the same time trying to appease Jewish Americans, whose money they needed to help them reopen the festival. But Siegfried goofed by ranting against ‘Jewish-Communist swine’ at a dinner for wealthy guests; refusing to ...”