“... me to reading Doughty’s desert monsterpiece. The ostensible reason was our glee at discovering Henry Reed’s poem about the ‘rose red sissy half as old as time’, which reads remarkably like a description of Monck himself, and which prompted him to direct my attention to the description of the rose-red city of Petra of the Nabataeans in Doughty’s ...”

“... the 19th century. Of the short novel he published in 1932 she gets the very title wrong. And poor Henry Arthur Jones must have suffered enough from his name without being transposed into Arthur Henry. Shaw’s near-compulsion was not a fetish. He was capable of loving women who were neither singers nor actresses. Indeed, he ...”

“... One of the more dismal scenes in English literature comes in Gissing’s Henry Rycroft (itself a pretty depressing book), where a labourer on a spree is driven out of a restaurant because he is intimidated by the formalities which go with the food. He ends by wrapping the lot in a newspaper and bolting. Bevin completely lacked class-consciousness – in the crabbed sense of the term, though he took a natural pride in his humble origins ...”

“... of the 18th-century code of samurai ethics, and The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima by Henry Scott Stokes, and Secker and Warburg Mishima’s tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility, in one attractive volume. At this year’s Cannes Film Festival an American film, Mishima, by Paul Schrader caused considerable controversy; and in the spring I saw in Paris ...”

“... to a work was like that of someone tapping a wall to find out where it is unsound, or like the bell-makers at the end of Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev who test the integrity of the newly-fired bell by tapping the cast with hammers and listening. What Bayley was listening for was the note of personality, and the ...”

“... furniture, and you witness the change in sensibility from Ruskin to Pater or from Dickens to Henry James. Yet from start to finish Webb never plumps for a clear style. Standen’s elevations are anything but Classical, and Red House is not really Gothic, though it emerges out of a line of middling-sized houses by the Goths Webb most admired ...”

“... to an old tradition. On every 19th of April, the date of Paul Revere’s ride, the town’s great bell rings out and ‘the people of the town awaken suddenly in their beds, and listen, and remember.’ The bell was made by Paul Revere, and what they allegedly remember is the horseman who came riding into town that day in ...”

“... distinguished by the most alliterative opening sentences I have ever read’. (‘Boom! went the bell of St Botolph’s, bidding her boys from book and board. Clang! came the curfew of Carfax, calling the citizens from counter and cloth-yard.’) From time to time Bernard would show up in Sussex and bark orders in ‘his military voice’ – he had others ...”

“... angry tenacity prevented her from achieving as she should have done. There are characters, like Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin, who did each other good but – fortunately, no doubt, for them – were much too self-absorbed to ascribe dominance to someone else. One cannot imagine either saying: ‘The one who dictates inside is you.’ More temperately, Nin ...”

“... accuracy or, as it seemed to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, literalism; he complained to William Bell Scott that most of the Academy pictures that year were ‘done in prose’. But this was what the general art-viewing public of the mid-Victorian years liked, a picture with a story they could follow and explain to one another. Not that it had to be a nice ...”

“... of decent emotion and decent understatement, derived perhaps from Trollope’s favourite Henry Esmond (which Sutherland has edited), is not infrequent in the Companion, for there are many comparably harrowing stories to be evoked: This was the period of the Irish famine and Mrs Bell Martin ... devoted herself to ...”

“... knew the unpleasant secrets of the Mews’ new home at 9 Gordon Street. By 1888 the eldest son, Henry, and the youngest daughter, Freda, were both incurably insane. Both had to be confined, Henry with his own nurse in Peckham Hospital, Freda in the Carisbrooke Mental Home on the Isle of Wight, the town which Charlotte ...”

“... This is the first full-length study of James Thomson’s life and work since Henry Salt’s in 1889. Thomson’s poem The City of Dreadful Night is known by name to many but has seldom been reprinted or discussed. Histories of literature say more about an earlier James Thomson (1700-48) who wrote The Seasons and ‘Rule Britannia’ and got into Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, though Johnson says his diction was ‘florid and luxuriant ...”

“... from the one awaiting visitors to Charleston. There, the pictures were surrounded by Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant’s exuberant decorations: patterned curtains and stencilled walls, painted door panels and richly emblazoned pottery.At Tilton the rooms were not so well proportioned and there was no flourishing garden. Lydia was not particularly ...”

“... in art and architecture but also in music, theatre, cinema, literature, fashion and food. By 1911, Henry Clay Frick had acquired Velázquez’s portrait of King Philip IV of Spain for $475,000, the highest price he had ever paid for a painting. William Randolph Hearst shipped over cartloads of hispano-moresque plates, furniture, choir screens, even entire ...”