“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”