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“... It was a curious set of circumstances that in 1820 drove James Cooper (the ‘middle surname’ Fenimore would not be added for another six years), the son of one of post-independence America’s wealthiest land speculators, to embark on a career in the dubious and unpredictable world of novel-writing. Almost nothing in Cooper’s life up until that year, in which he turned 31, indicates an interest in fiction, or in the arts ...”

“... Relief, rather than mourning, greeted Gloriana’s passing; and all eyes turned to Scotland and James VI. Back to Basics, however, did nothing to resolve the structural problems of English government. The issues which had increasingly dogged Elizabeth’s later years – the decline in royal revenue, the falling value of Parliamentary subsidy, the running ...”

“... from bloody exit to obscure entrance, and Jane’s is one of them. She was beheaded in 1542, with Henry VIII’s fifth queen, Catherine Howard. She was one of Catherine’s ladies, and for reasons which remain inaccessible to us, she had helped the dizzy little person carry on a love affair with a courtier, Thomas Culpepper. She passed on letters and misled ...”

“... The manuscripts of Henry Cockburn’s letters have been gathered together in the National Library of Scotland, where they cry out for a collected edition. When such an edition appears, they cannot fail to be recognised as a masterpiece of Scottish literature. I came, while engaged in writing a book about Cockburn, to love his letters, and I have even managed to love those which turned up too late for consideration in the book ...”

“... straight through can pick up what happened ante for himself (who is going to forget the death of Henry Thrale?), while the reader who is trying to look something up will be helped just as much by a sufficient index. There is much more that we would wish to know than is offered by the notes. For instance, in Volume I the only note on John Taylor, Johnson’s ...”

“... the time. Another way to phrase the same exam question would have been: ‘Have you read Margery James?’ I’m sure I hadn’t; I have now. I was reminded of the exam question when I went to the wine cellars at Berry Brothers & Rudd on St James’s Street in early December, and as I ordered ...”

“... is one of the innumerable riffs in Stein which show off her love of discriminations – as though Henry James’s intelligence has acquired a manic style – but it’s also a demonstration of an unstated theory. According to this theory, all artistic work needs to be placed within its properly domestic sphere. ‘I began with Fernande and then there ...”

“... not at that moment trying to create a work of art. But it is reinforced by an anecdote related by Henry Savage Landor. Landor was dining with Whistler (it was in 1896, towards the end of the painter’s life), and in the drawing-room, after dinner, his eye was caught by a skull and a lamp on the grand piano and he suggested that Whistler should sketch this ...”

“... criticism in five words or fewer: on her third quarto of Othello, ‘a sad one’; on her copy of James Shirley’s The Constant Maid, or Love Will Find Out the Way, ‘I doe not lik this.’ Across the start of Eastward Hoe, the very funny city comedy by George Chapman, Ben Jonson and John Marston, she wrote ‘prity one’, then crossed it ...”

“... The 13th-century jurist Henri de Bracton, who formalised the growing body of case law under Henry III, had stressed that ‘in misdeeds we look to the will and not the outcome,’ and consequently ‘a madman is not liable.’ From this point on, madness was defined by legal concepts such as mens rea (guilty intention) and non compos mentis (unsound ...”

“... had actually been started by the Scots and had been finally resolved, years later, in Ireland when James II, the last Stuart king, was defeated at the Battle of the Boyne in 1689, it was downright alarming to go home and see TV footage of riots at Orange parades that showed this supposedly definitive and long-past battle was actually still in progress, and ...”

“... This is the first full-length study of James Thomson’s life and work since Henry Salt’s in 1889. Thomson’s poem The City of Dreadful Night is known by name to many but has seldom been reprinted or discussed. Histories of literature say more about an earlier James Thomson (1700-48) who wrote The Seasons and ‘Rule Britannia’ and got into Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, though Johnson says his diction was ‘florid and luxuriant ...”

“... I turned her attentions to the Earl of Essex. George Villiers, first duke of Buckingham, told James VI and I that what they enjoyed together was ‘more affection than between lovers in the best kind’. Lucy Hughes-Hallett wonders, in her biography of Buckingham, if chiefs of staff or special advisers can be understood as favourites, but really there is ...”

“... protested, and the consequence was the presumably unique disclaimer in the Epilogue to 2 Henry IV. The decision to do away with Falstaff is characteristic of a certain archaeological rigour in the editors’ procedures. Of course they are right to say that if we use their work we must live with their decisions, but it may simply be too late for most ...”

“... gets credit for proscribing as treason any plot against the life of a feudal superior, and Henry VII for backdating his reign to the day before the Battle of Bosworth, making a traitor of anyone who fought for Richard III. There followed, in 1495, his Treason Act, which recognised that it was ‘ayenst all lawes reason and gode conscience’ to ...”