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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... scholar would undertake such an edition. Nor is there any consensus on the quality of his poems; James VI, in his youth, termed him ‘maister poete’ and ‘prince of poets’, and some modern critics adopt these terms with enthusiasm – indeed, Helena Shire calls him an ‘arch-poet’. (I suppose that if one has to use a periphrasis, ‘the maister ...”

“... reading, too, consisted primarily of letters and biography, especially the former – Lawrence, Henry and William James, Morris, Darwin. When Bunting visited her in 1967 she was thrilled and wrote to Jonathan Williams: ‘Basil Bunting came to see me and it was a high point in my later life. I think in my afterlife I’d ...”

“... Casaubon, Mayerne sought, and received, sanctuary at the court of the British philosopher-king James VI and I, where erudition was prized over orthodoxy – or indeed decorum. England was to be Mayerne’s de facto home for the rest of his life. The wars of religion had injected a crucial element of paranoia into court life. Kings and leading courtiers not ...”

“... these books might have travelled far less well. The most recent addition to the series, Heather James’s Shakespeare’s Troy, is reasonably typical of the rest, so far as I have seen them. Her main argument concerns the theme of the translation of empire (translatio imperii) and its accompanying translatio studii. This idea, which flourished in medieval ...”

“... his own business, and one of his employees – Phipps – has a healthy eight-year-old son called James. You ask this boy’s father if you can experiment on his son. The father agrees. After all, you are a respected figure. Your experiment goes something like this. A young girl, Sarah Nelmes, is a patient of yours and is known to be infected with the human ...”

“... Dame Helen, she proposes to get on with the job of analysing a specific text. She chooses, first, Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. With scholarly precision she compiles from previous critics a long, sad list of interpretations not warranted by the text. She then enters the labyrinth herself and finds that it is a maze of mirrors (beginning with the ...”

“... out at the first horizon’. The Shakespeare Wallah takes its title from the film made by James Ivory and Ismail Merchant from a script by the novelist Ruth Jhabvala, about a troupe of Shakespearean actors travelling over the Indian sub-continent. The troupe was based on Geoffrey Kendal’s Shakespeareana Company. His book is described as ‘the ...”

“... of the Indian National Congress. Another civil servant who became President of Congress was Sir Henry Cotton, whose family followed Indian careers for six consecutive generations in a direct male line. His great-grandfather was a director of the East India Company, his grandfather, father and son were in the Madras Civil Service, he himself served in ...”

“... François I’s service in 1515 or 1516, and Lucas Horenbout, born in Ghent and first recorded in Henry VIII’s in 1525.The oldest miniature on display in The Reflected Self is a portrait by the Horenbout family workshop, c.1544-50, depicting a lady often said to be Catherine Parr – though the exhibition’s curators plausibly suggest that she is more ...”

“... If the world should end tomorrow,’ James Agee wrote in the Nation in 1947, ‘this film would furnish one of the more appropriate epitaphs: a sad, magnificent summing-up of a night city.’ A little earlier and in another paper he had called the film’s second part ‘half-baked’, and what’s interesting is that there is no real contradiction between the points of view ...”