“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... were as full of mud and blood and horrors and blunders as the long Somme agony was. A review of Henry Williamson’s book on the Somme by some hysterical nitwit claimed that all the good and brave and the potential leaders were annihilated, and apparently on the first day! Frightful as it was, one must remember that it was followed by the large-scale ...”

“... James Wilcox’s charming comedy is set in rural Louisiana, among people who read the Bible in an engagingly amateurish way, associating religion with the conventions about drinking and dancing enforced by their anxious parents, and sometimes tempted to ‘modernise’ their lives, while still seeking God’s guidance ...”

“... Great wits don’t always readily agree, and there was another on the scene in the person of Henry Cockburn, whose career and reputation show several points of similarity with Smith’s: the two did not quarrel, but he was to have more to do with Cockburn’s friend Jeffrey, editor of the Review. Jeffrey’s cockiness and scepticism were chided and ...”

“... Hester Salusbury married first the wealthy brewer, MP, womaniser and ‘Southwark macaroni’ Henry Thrale, with whom she had 12 children, only four of whom survived, and then the Italian music master Gabriel Piozzi, for whom she pined passionately at the ripe old age of 40, and scandalised her circle by not only marrying but happily introducing him into ...”

“... of voice.’ If Bagehot knew that ‘the lecture of a professor’ was not his natural medium, Henry Sidgwick knew no other, unless it were sitting in his study, grinding out the ‘632 rather closely printed octavo pages’ of The Elements of Politics, with the sapping doubt as to whether it was worthwhile in one half of his mind, and in the other the ...”

“... which made him the upper classes’ favourite, and most expensive, legal confidant. In 1865, Sir James Willes wept as he sentenced Constance Kent to death for suffocating her little brother and hiding his body in the vault of an outside privy. That’s the sort of court-room occasion the Victorians loved. Newspaper agitation for the commuting of death ...”

“... of Middleton and John Knight of Manchester were supported by men of higher social status, such as Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt, a gentleman farmer originally from Wiltshire. Hunt was politically ambitious and a populist in the old sense of the word. He came to national attention when he delivered rousing speeches at the mass demonstrations on Spa Fields in ...”

“... James​ Allen was working for a London shipwright when he was killed by a falling piece of timber in 1829. He had been married to his wife, Abigail, for more than twenty years. The medical students who performed the autopsy declared Allen’s body anatomically female, but the coroner continued to call the deceased ‘he’ because ‘I considered it impossible for him to be a woman, as he had a wife ...”