“... Randall Jarrell’s possible suicide, Bill’s own depression. And I talked to him about William James’s own breakdown and his resuscitation through faith. What in hell am I doing with all these theatre types? Alfred Kazin’s journals, 26 December 1986 Discount Kazin’s weary, load-bearing sigh in this characteristic entry from his journals, which ...”

“... an attempt to diminish the opulent magnificence of the Mughal court. Yet he was the ambassador of James VI and I, who had advised his heir, Prince Henry, in Basilicon Doron (1599) that ‘a king is as one set on a stage, whose smallest actions and gestures all the people gazingly do behold.’Ten months after the audience ...”

“... to royal progresses. Festivity could be used to serve political purposes too, as Elizabeth I and James I realised: they resurrected older festive traditions or invented new ones, developing them into cults and electing themselves as the chief divinities. In his discussion of periodic jollifications Laroque is judicious, superbly informed and meticulous; he ...”

“... There is Hilary the hard-bitten tabloid columnist. Roddy the heartless art-dealing seducer, Henry the free-market ideologue, Dorothy the profit-mad agriculturalist. As a dynasty, however, these men and women belong to another literary and temporal mode entirely – to the spoof Gothic fiction of Winshaw Towers, with its cartoon-like turrets and ...”

“... on bringing out one new book after another, no matter how fine a steam rises from the dome of James Wood. (Writing in the New Republic, Wood welcomed Updike’s bestseller Terrorist into the world by wishing it had been aborted: ‘John Updike should have run a thousand miles away from this subject – at least as soon as he saw the results on the ...”

“... to fictional treatment by any of the subtler practitioners of her day. Jane always wanted William James to teach at Stanford, and he did finally agree to come (though he arrived after her death). He didn’t much enjoy his time there: ‘every lecture a dead weight’, he wrote to his daughter as the semester dragged on. It was too bad Jane hadn’t included ...”

“... summers, it was the winters that had stuck in my mind. I’d found the perfect image: George Henry Boughton’s Pilgrims Going to Church (1867), a depiction of settlers in New Plymouth trudging through their first winter. Why the snow seemed important I’m not sure. Perhaps extreme cold, and unpreparedness for it, enhances the drama of history, pointing ...”

“... whirling before she was born. Probably, her real father was the angelically handsome seducer Henry Cust, who played tennis in the nude. Her mother, Violet, Duchess of Rutland, sculpted so well that Rodin compared her with Donatello. Watts said she drew like Holbein. But the first thing to say about Violet was that she was supremely beautiful. (Had she ...”

“... and honest and sober’ would win riches. He left the inevitable corollary to preachers such as Henry Ward Beecher: ‘If men have not enough it is from want of provident care, and foresight, and industry and frugality. No man in this land suffers from poverty unless it be more than his fault – unless it be his sin.’ This moral economy nourishes a ...”

“... out of it, or the title of the second anyway. Finn. Finnegan. It was here on 10 June 1904 that James Joyce met Nora Barnacle, who worked in the hotel. The two young strangers who had locked eyes stopped to talk, and they arranged to meet four days later outside the house where Sir William Wilde, eye surgeon to the queen in Ireland, if she should have ever ...”

“... in the secret closet of the self.Characters caught up in exactly the same story form the basis of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady. The old man leaves the money to his niece so that she can ‘meet the requirements of her imagination’. The phrase belongs to the old man’s son, Ralph, and so does the idea of the legacy. Just before he himself ...”

“... rajah. ‘My collection of curiosities, Indian relics etc tally admirably with the house,’ Henry Wellcome wrote to his business partner, Silas Burroughs, ‘and so everybody seems rather fascinated with the effect, and in fact I rather like it myself. Some call it “Aesthetic”, some say “Heathenish”, some ...”

“... would respect the modestly reformed political and religious hierarchy. This is the backdrop to James Secord’s concise and engaging survey of the popular science literature that transformed the book trade during the 1830s. The era has been viewed as something of a literary hiatus, with Romanticism in decline after Byron and the Victorian serial yet to ...”

“... a man of letters. He is all combined; and perhaps he is something more.’In​ the 1830s, as James Secord has shown, scientific literature had become hugely popular with the reading public. In fiction, it was an interregnum between the age of poets, such as Poe’s hero Lord Byron, and the full flourishing of the 19th-century novel. Popularisers of ...”

“... the moral ambitions it represented. This branch-to-branch search is centred on John Stuart Mill, Henry Fawcett and Leslie Stephen. He then traces the change in style and tone which came as the academic profession and the public service spread their tentacles. He discusses three legal theorists who epitomised this transition – ...”