“... tastefully; there are no four-letter words, none of the remorseless physical detail of Henry Miller’s cavortings; Singer’s erotic themes are associated with drives and compulsions. And whereas Miller was able with his excess of physical detail to break through to a self-awareness, was able to demystify male delusions for himself and his ...”

“... faisandés tastes and a bluff and hearty roast-beef-and-Yorkshire Englishman; Baudelaire and Henry Fielding combined’). We believe in a personality devoted to art but deploring artiness, cherishing self-expression but abominating self-promotion; just as we are able to glimpse the fashionable ballet-conductor pausing to talk to an alley cat. We ...”

“... Yet Charles gave a free hand to an archbishop seemingly bent on destroying the supremacy which Henry VIII had won for the Crown. Puritans were bound to ask whether Charles was not being taken in by Laud. Were not the Laudians, outwardly so deferential to the king who backed their policies, using his support to entrench the Church’s power so deeply that ...”

“... author becomes culturally effective, and the translator a “noble collateral” with him.’ Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, relied heavily on Douglas’s Eneados when he translated Books Two and Four of Virgil’s epic into English. Surrey rejected Douglas’s use of rhyming couplets and drew on Italian verso sciolto to create the earliest form of blank ...”

“... salutary way from that of the judge who in 1797 directed the jury trying Tom Paine’s publisher, Thomas Williams, for blasphemy that the Christian religion was part of the law of England. In these and endless other ways, the UK’s constitution changes constantly, blown by winds of which the actors are barely aware. Who today would like to be heard saying ...”

“... vaguer fatamorgana figures of your own scarce conscious hopes and desires’. The protagonist in Henry James’s story ‘The Velvet Glove’ feels ‘held down as by a hand mailed in silver’ while listening to a Wagnerian tenor. Hours of suffocation and reverie in the dark created a sense of initiation in a Wagnerian cult.‘Wagnerism’, Alex Ross ...”

“... we soon learn, had similar expectations: ‘I had read Jane Austen and Charles Dickens and Henry James, and I expected England to be the book I always wanted to live in.’ But, Malcolm writes dryly, for Stevenson ‘England turned out to be another book altogether.’ Soon after the publication of Bitter Fame, Malcolm meets her in London at the ...”

“... its interests anywhere in the world.’ That goes for some of his own ancestors, like Sir Henry Blake, a ferocious oppressor and landlord in Ireland (though a more liberal governor of Hong Kong); or Sir Thomas Osborne, who made his tenants pay rent in horses, cows and pigs, and preferred to be treated by a vet than ...”

“... of occupation.’ As recently as 25 September 2001, three former American Ambassadors to Japan – Thomas Foley, a former Speaker of the House of Representatives, Michael Armacost, the president of the Brookings Institution, and Walter Mondale, Carter’s Vice-President – wrote a joint letter to the Washington Post denouncing Congress for its willingness ...”

“... was now the Cinema Museum. My companion, Anna Sinclair, was due to introduce a double bill of Henry Hathaway’s Niagara and Polanski’s Cul-de-Sac, films illuminated by the best of bad girls, Marilyn Monroe and Françoise Dorléac. If the Ambulance Service was in trouble in Wales, reduced to issuing ‘sincere condolences’ after the latest ...”

“... but a meteor had made the world irritable, nervous, querulous, unreasonable and afraid,’ Henry Adams wrote in his autobiography (1907): ‘All the new forces, condensed into corporations, were demanding a new type of man – a man with ten times the endurance, energy, will and mind of the old type.’ When O’Neill finally emerged on the scene in ...”

“... Bruce Bennett, to publish details of the events behind it in Spirit in Exile. In the 1950s Jannice Henry, an 18-year-old doctor’s daughter from Surrey, fell in love with her father’s locum, Neil Micklem. Their affair lasted for years; Jannice hoped it would end in marriage. It did not. She married instead a 30-year-old advertising copywriter called Peter ...”

“... the plague? Gilman isn’t much interested in counter-examples, such as the words of the musician Thomas Whythorne during the outbreak of 1563 (quoted by the historian Paul Slack in his still unsurpassed 1985 study, The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England): ‘I looked every minute of an hour when I should be visited as the rest were. I doubting the ...”

“... The principle that ‘perpetuity’ was forbidden existed before and throughout the reign of Henry VIII. ‘The mischief that would arise to the public,’ a Master of the Rolls later said, ‘from estates remaining for ever or for a long time inalienable or untransferable [would be] a damp to industry and a prejudice to trade.’ The mischief caused by ...”

“... wants to link this up to a strand in Scottish philosophical history, encapsulated in the work of Thomas Reid (1710-96) on common sense, in which trusting one’s faculties, investing belief in one’s natural judgment, is fundamental – and a universal given to mankind. As Kelman has it, Chomsky’s Cartesian common sense tradition and the Scottish common ...”