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“... with Shakespeare’s plays, but I believe it is necessary to set two passages from Richard II and Henry IV Part I next to this sonnet – which, as Vendler says, is the first to remark on ‘a true flaw’ in the friend. In Act III of Richard II, Bolingbroke and his party confront Richard at Flint Castle in Wales: See, see, King Richard doth himself ...”

“... which describes the all-round intellectualism of his youth; it was he who taught Alexander Graham Bell the principles of electricity. However, when we read that Murray ‘cherished the fact’ of befriending a local ancient, alive when William and Mary were proclaimed joint sovereign by Parliament in 1689, we find the ancient too ancient for belief; according ...”

“... than any novelty. It would be a sad day indeed when there should be something new to say.’ Henry James’s fear that what the tourist has known and loved and already thought perfect in Venice might alter is a familiar sentiment: we all know this longing for things to remain as they were when we first knew them. The same might be said of our feelings ...”

“... his mother to visit Heywood in the Tower. Donne’s family fortunes did not improve: his brother Henry was imprisoned in 1593 for harbouring a priest, and died of the plague while in Newgate. We don’t know much about what Donne did when he left university. He may have travelled abroad. A ‘Jhon Downes’ is recorded in a list of household servants of the ...”

“... unconsciously needing a man’s hand, that of the phantom Mr Rochester or the real curate, Arthur Bell Nichols, who was still to come. And Emily seems in her own unwilling way to have also been the imaginative catalyst in their world. Katherine Frank makes the interesting point that both Charlotte and Anne, in their second published novels, drew heavily for ...”

“... Cadell (father and son) and George Robinson in London, and Alexander Kincaid, John Balfour, John Bell and William Creech in Edinburgh, were not ‘mechanicks’ as Strahan once complained, but collaborators in a London-Edinburgh publishing enterprise that put Scotland on the literary map. For John Pinkerton, an Edinburgh attorney and antiquary, the London ...”

“... images of great men. But many early art photographs do recall paintings. Country people in Peter Henry Emerson’s pictures from the 1880s and 1890s of rural life in East Anglia have a Millet-like quietness. Alvin Langdon Coburn’s photogravures of London at night taken in the early 1900s emulate the inky fogs and soft highlights of contemporary etched ...”

“... the popular version of Scottish history that once flourished in pubs and school playgrounds, Henry Bell invented steam navigation when the Comet began its regular voyages between Glasgow, Greenock and Helensburgh in the summer of Napoleon’s advance on Moscow. In fact, Robert Fulton’s steamboat Clermont had started running on the Hudson in ...”

“... to deal with the American writer’s life through the alter ego of unprolific Jewish novelist Henry Bech, here attending a party: Like a fuzzy sock being ejected by the tumble drier there was flung towards Bech the shapeless face of Vernon Klegg, the American Kafka, whose austere minimalist renderings of kitchen spats and dishevelled mobile homes were ...”

“... let’s not drown ourselves in it.’ ‘Gone for good? Gone for bad.’ ‘I was sound as a bell, as a belfryful of bells.’ One weakness of The Blue Guitar is that it seems excessively like a novel. Its symbols and themes are neat and readily explicable. Oliver is a stealer of both trinkets and wives. When the inevitable reckoning comes, he is berated ...”

“... became more beguilingly flute-like, so his eternal Chapter One became more leaden-seeming: ‘Henry has fallen in love on the platform of Paddington Station and is just passing Suttons Seeds on his way to Eton.’ MacCarthy married at 29 and his bride Molly was not slow to join the chorus of reproach. She was herself a writer of real verve and in her ...”

“... the 19th century. Of the short novel he published in 1932 she gets the very title wrong. And poor Henry Arthur Jones must have suffered enough from his name without being transposed into Arthur Henry. Shaw’s near-compulsion was not a fetish. He was capable of loving women who were neither singers nor actresses. Indeed, he ...”

“... me to reading Doughty’s desert monsterpiece. The ostensible reason was our glee at discovering Henry Reed’s poem about the ‘rose red sissy half as old as time’, which reads remarkably like a description of Monck himself, and which prompted him to direct my attention to the description of the rose-red city of Petra of the Nabataeans in Doughty’s ...”

“... One of the more dismal scenes in English literature comes in Gissing’s Henry Rycroft (itself a pretty depressing book), where a labourer on a spree is driven out of a restaurant because he is intimidated by the formalities which go with the food. He ends by wrapping the lot in a newspaper and bolting. Bevin completely lacked class-consciousness – in the crabbed sense of the term, though he took a natural pride in his humble origins ...”

“... of the 18th-century code of samurai ethics, and The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima by Henry Scott Stokes, and Secker and Warburg Mishima’s tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility, in one attractive volume. At this year’s Cannes Film Festival an American film, Mishima, by Paul Schrader caused considerable controversy; and in the spring I saw in Paris ...”