“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Company in 1660. History has, until recently, neglected British queens consort – apart from Henry VIII’s wives or the ‘agent of corruption’, Henrietta Maria, consort of Charles I. Meanwhile, histories of the Restoration are still dominated by Charles the ‘merry monarch’: mistresses in tow, keen on jokes and blessed with the common touch. He ...”

“... Henry Crabb Robinson had a busy evening on 27 January 1818: having attended William Hazlitt’s lecture on Shakespeare and Milton at the Surrey Institution, he hurried over the river to the London Philosophical Society to hear the first lecture in a new course by Coleridge. He was gratified to find there ‘a large and respectable audience – generally of very superior looking persons ...”

“... want to overdetermine to the point of absurdity, but it seems fairly obvious that what Clive James represents is a kind of stylised distortion of what Britain sees itself as: a kind of self-possessed jokey coarseness, very smart and very educated, a sort of sharp-talking deified moron – who then has to be defined (surprise, surprise) as Australian. He ...”

“... do the events of this world lay open to us!’ The thought is echoed in the closing pages of Clive James’s Brilliant Creatures, whose author-hero is said to be a ‘chapter of accidents’, and in the title and precarious plot of Anthony Powell’s O, How the wheel becomes it! The wheel is Ophelia’s, and suggests the incessant circlings of fortune, but ...”

“... work. Philby achieved this by tipping the spy-catcher for the Western world, the CIA officer James Jesus Angleton, into clinical madness. Philby had help, of course. Alcohol, Angleton’s own personality, the very nature of spy-catching, the power of bureaucracies, and the appalling inefficiency of the CIA’s system of checks and controls, all ...”

“... a grocer’s shop,’ declares the impeccably fogeyish hero of Gissing’s The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (1903), ‘and see in the window a display of foreign butter. This is the kind of thing that makes one gloom over the prospects of England. The deterioration of English butter is one of the worst signs of the moral state of our people.’ Eighty ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... contracts a number of marriages and meets just about everyone worth meeting. Anthony Powell and Henry Green are his contemporaries at Oxford; he takes tea with Ottoline Morrell and twits Virginia Woolf. Cyril Connolly and Evelyn Waugh are London acquaintances. Picasso sketches his portrait, Hemingway is a fellow war correspondent, and Paris brings a meeting ...”

“... third describes a book by J.H. Findlater, while the fourth is from a review of The Soft Side by Henry James. Good writing is something you can only teach yourself. I also believe, and if I am old-fashioned in this then so be it, that the writer knows best. He always did. If he didn’t, or doesn’t, nothing interesting will be published. A writer ...”

“... have outlined could be unbearable in the hands of any writer less sensitive than Elizabeth Bowen. Henry James had a similar theme on his hands in The Wings of the Dove. He cooled the cruelty of it by intellectualising its moral problem. Colette could take any amount of cruelty on the chin and in her hard-bitten way grin at it like a mauled boxer. With ...”

“... refine and spiritualise, a deep dream about belonging. They search for and deny an idea about what Henry James called ‘the Great Good Place’, part-American, part-European: and they finally localise it (if anywhere) in ‘England and nowhere’ – an England at war. The magical places invoked – a historical house, a Tudor village, a childhood ...”

“... Her whole life was shaped by her mother’s straightforwardness and bravery in a crisis: when Henry VIII wanted Katherine to accept that she had never been married to him, she refused to do so, and by her unchanging refusal, gave her daughter an example of how to behave. Mary spent her life trying to undo the wrong done to her mother and her mother’s ...”

“... First World War). In Ladysmith, Foden’s Boer War novel, technology has an almost magical power. Henry Nevinson, a reporter for the Daily Chronicle and one of many characters in the novel to be drawn from history, uses the telegraph to deliver his copy: ‘the atoms of the telegraphs’ somehow travel ‘via Durban . . . passing deep under the sea, up to ...”