“... 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 ...”

“... On​ 10 January 1616, Sir Thomas Roe was received by Emperor Jahangir at his court in Ajmer in Northern India. Jahangir sat in an overhead gallery, with guests standing in hierarchically ranked tiers, and Roe remarked how ‘this sitting out hath so much affinity with a theatre … the king in his gallery; the great men lifted on a stage as actors; the vulgar below gazing on ...”

“... published under the name of the committee’s lead researcher, a heterosexual doctor called George Henry, who pathologised the subjects. Despite its medicalised approach, the book remains an important document. But Gay herself was largely forgotten, at least in comparison to later researchers of sexuality such as Virginia Johnson, William Masters and Alfred ...”

“... graduates and/or instructors), divided into three main groups: ‘technomodernism’ (John Barth, Thomas Pynchon), ‘high cultural pluralism’ (Toni Morrison, Sandra Cisneros) and ‘lower-middle-class modernism’ (Raymond Carver, Joyce Carol Oates), with Venn diagrams illustrating the overlap between these groups, and their polarisation by aesthetic ...”

“... edition of The Writings of Herman Melville, edited by Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker and G. Thomas Tanselle. Now, in 1996, this same Hershel Parker, a professor of English at the University of Delaware, has constructed an alternative version meant to approximate the originally completed novel Melville delivered to Harpers. In the absence of any ...”

“... Edinburgh did adopt him. His talents took him to the Royal High School, where William Drummond, Henry Mackenzie and Walter Scott had been before him. There Karl became favourite pupil and close friend of Hector MacIver, that incomparable teacher of literature, who recognised his gifts and took him with his other clever boys down the Calton Hill to Rose ...”

“... leading management books of the Eighties have been American, and ‘excellence’ is their creed. Thomas Peters and Robert Waterman Junior’s In Search of Excellence1 appeared in 1982 and it quickly established itself as the best-selling management book ever. Here was an unambiguous riposte to the Japanese economic miracle, that Pearl Harbour of the Carter ...”

“... Few​ today remember Captain Henry Hill (1812-82), a military tailor turned quartermaster of the First Sussex Rifle Volunteers. According to the Brighton census of 1881, Hill, who was then in his late sixties, lived on ‘funded property’ at 53 Marine Parade with his wife, Charlotte; his 27-year-old nephew, James; and three servants ...”

“... defining piece on the meaning of the terror attacks’ in a profile studded with praise from Henry Kissinger which also proposed Zakaria as America’s first Muslim secretary of state. Tina Brown called him ‘New York’s hot brainiac of choice’. Zakaria’s article appeared during the moment of primitive fury that overcame even ...”