“... of the world: he wanted fame – and yet he did not want to be tainted with success. This is James King, who despite having already written the life of another mad poet, William Cowper, is ploddingly rational. The only occasion on which the two poets met was about twenty years after Cowper died, when he came to Blake in a dream. According to some ...”

“... seeking his approval to get a Sullivanian therapist: ‘There was pressure,’ the sculptor James Wolfe recalled, but if you did it, then suddenly ‘you had access.’ Among those who signed on were the artists Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski and Larry Poons. Some were just dabbling, but Olitski went all in, bringing his wife and daughters with him, and ...”

“... Ruth as home run baseball floating in the air, unmistakably baseball and unmistakably Ruth. And Henry Major’s Ernst Lubitsch, Will Cotton’s Theodore Dreiser, Hirschfeld’s Bojangles Robinson, and more and more, all well-known and all made new. That shock of the familiar, the celebrity instantly recognisable by the trademark logo that the artist ...”

“... offered by her fellow royal chroniclers are conspicuously at odds. Haseler just wants a republic. James Whitaker believes that Charles will soldier on magnificently, but only if he shows Camilla the door. Conversely, Anthony Holden and A.N. Wilson want him to step down, but disagree over who should replace him. And Dennis Friedman puts the whole Windsor mess ...”

“... For a long time, Henry Roth’s silence was considered one of the most resonant in modern American literature. Ralph Ellison and J.D. Salinger were his only competition. When Call It Sleep (1934), Roth’s first novel, became a bestseller, thirty years after it first appeared, reporters found him scraping a living in Maine, gloomily slaughtering ducks and geese with equipment he’d made out of parts scavenged from discarded washing-machines ...”

“... uses two remorselessly productive diarists to cast light on very different class experiences. Henry ‘Chips’ Channon was dead at 61, nine years before the 1967 Act decriminalised the kind of affairs he’d been having before, during and after his marriage to the fabulously wealthy Honor Guinness. Parker gives us extracts from Chips’s diaries, during ...”

“... side of Exchequer jurisdiction with the remark that ‘this development began during the reign of Henry VIII and can be seen as part of the Tudor Revolution in Government.’ (What, then, of the law of buggery, whose history begins with the act of 1534? Should this be understood as part of the Tudor Revolution?) Sometimes it is bathetic, as when S.E. Lehmberg ...”

“... Canning, Mayo and Dufferin. The liberal quartet of the Mills (father and son), Macaulay and Henry Maine wrote a lot about India, and even more has been written about them. But theirs was largely an India of the imagination. The Mills never went; Macaulay lasted four years and Maine six. India could provoke radicalism: take Annie Besant or George ...”

“... to the belief systems of the lie-ee, putting a fictional character within a fabric of lies (as Henry James often does) is a great way of exploring the nature and the perceptual limitations of that person. Although that fictional technique was to become common in the novel, the most influential literary instance is Othello, a play which not ...”

“... on A.E. Housman as a classical scholar or his influential meditation on ‘The Ambiguity of Henry James’. In 1940 he published To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History, his account of the revolutionary tradition from Michelet through Marx and up to the Bolsheviks. This may look like the one among his works that was ...”

“... status of photography, which in many versions of its power and its responsibilities has what Henry James, in another context, called ‘a fatal cheapness’. Arbus was ready to deal with that in full knowledge and with full consent. She approached her responsibilities to the art of photography with a mixture of irony and neediness, dark laughter and ...”

“... that originated in dorsal trauma. ‘Spinal irritation’ was a popular diagnosis at the time: Henry and William James acquired the disorder to sit out, as it were, the American Civil War. Their plucky sister Alice spent a lifetime in bed on account of her spinal affliction, the ‘dorsal trouble in the blood’ which ...”

“... confidently comprehensive title they gave it, the editors of the First Folio, John Heminges and Henry Condell, were defeated by the task of assembling all of their late colleague’s plays: we will never know how many nights’ sleep they lost over their failure to secure a copy of Love’s Labour’s Won, written before 1598 and printed in quarto before ...”

“... anxious to place themselves in a context, try hard to evoke it. Sylvia Lawson, a descendant of Henry Lawson, was a pioneer –the pioneer – Australian woman literary journalist in the Fifties. In the editorial office of Tom Fitzgerald’s Nation magazine in George Street, Sydney, she would elegantly sip the wine provided while the rest of us tried to ...”

“... from syphilis by 1612, his subsequent literary achievements – writing or collaborating on Henry VIII, The Two Noble Kinsmen and the lost Cardenio – must be seen as all the more remarkable. Because Greer badly wants to believe that Ann was economically independent, she refuses to concede that ‘on the strength of writing 44 plays and having a small ...”