“... labour, a way of life’. Her artless title is taken from a letter Helen Lowe-Porter wrote to Thomas Mann after she became his English translator. She was, she said later, an ‘unknown instrument … which … must … serve him to change the garment of his art into a better one which might clothe her for the marketplace until times changed’. ‘Like a ...”

“... institution’: racial slavery. The leaders of the Confederacy, explicitly repudiating Thomas Jefferson’s declaration that ‘all men are created equal,’ had committed themselves to racial hierarchy. ‘Our new government … rests,’ the Confederate vice president, Alexander Stephens, observed, ‘upon the great truth that the negro is not ...”

“... from the after-effects of a childhood cricket injury.Biographers of Grey, including the latest, Thomas Otte, have taken these three incidents in their stride, granting them a few incurious sentences at most. Instead they have dwelled on Grey’s love of homely nature: his passion for fly-fishing and bird-watching, his long weekends in Hampshire, his ...”

“... considered as outcast children’. Toussaint Louverture, the best known of them, was followed by Henry Christophe, who declared himself king in a hereditary monarchy. Historians have mocked him for his crowns and gorgeous uniforms. But Colley comes impressively to his defence. In 1811, a monarchy might still attract an international respect denied to ...”

“... I might be an important person.4 October 1997. Dinner at the country house of the Baroness Dunn. Henry (‘Taipan’) Keswick and the now ex-ministerial but ever-amusing Richard Needham are fellow-guests. A heated disagreement between them about Chris Patten’s governorship of Hong Kong flares up and amicably subsides. Entirely by chance, we meet the ...”

“... J.A. Symonds, Pater, the always dependable Shakespeare and Michelangelo, Whitman, Marlowe and Henry Scott Tuke, the painter of bathing boys. Three or four are mere suspects, followed by question marks: Samuel Butler? Luca Signorelli? Forster had presumably seen those great paeans to the male buttocks, Signorelli’s frescoes in Orvieto cathedral, and come ...”

“... mulatto and house-nigger (Ariel) rather than a field-nigger (Caliban).’ In ‘Talking Black’, Henry Louis Gates, searching for a black critical language with which to read black texts, describes the same problem from a different point of view. How can we write or read the text of ‘Blackness’? What language(s) do black people use to represent their ...”

“... Guggenheim lot seem to have made mental instability a social requirement. So did people like Dylan Thomas, who saw White romantically as a wild animal kept safe ‘behind the suburban-zoo bars’. Henry Miller and Alfred Perles (who published some of White’s poems in their magazine the Booster) thought madness ‘a ...”

“... a diffused self-portrait onto four well-known cultural figures who had been his friends (Dylan Thomas, George Orwell, Eric Gill and John Middleton Murry), evoking them first separately and then in some slightly dizzying comparisons: I had seen Murry working, happily absorbed and with real skill, mending fences, sawing up logs (once, too absorbed), laying ...”

“... bitterness could have made the poet tell a New York audience including Franklin Roosevelt, Henry Morgenthau and Sinclair Lewis that ‘a great portion of the world suffers from your civilisation.’ Travelling to Paris, Wilson may have believed that liberalism ‘must be more liberal than ever before, it must even be radical, if civilisation is to ...”

“... King and the other ministers and divinity students at the movement’s core. They sound less like Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence, and more like the early New England Puritans – those children of Israel in the New World – only they plead the case for inclusion rather than exclusion. ‘All Christians are of one body in Christ,’ John ...”

“... the missionary lobby, which wanted to provide more humanitarian assistance to Ottoman subjects.) Henry Morgenthau, the former American Ambassador to Turkey and a Jewish anti-Zionist, advised Robert Lansing, the Secretary of State, that the Turks desired a separate peace with the US, a settlement which would have had the effect of increasing relief efforts to ...”

“... of 3 January 2019): ‘The tattoo remains popular, though bizarrely one person thought it was of Henry Kissinger. It also makes for an amusing conversation during intercourse.’ This suggests the intercourse might be less than fervent, my name in itself something of a detumescent.28 April. The most one can hope from a reader is that he or she should ...”

“... texts that look extensively at the slave trade – Aphra Behn’s novel Oroonoko (1688) and Thomas Southerne’s stage adaptation of it (1695) – are structured by the motifs and conventions of revenge tragedy: resentment, conspiracy, delay, the grand soliloquy and, above all, tortured bodies.Reflecting on the prominence of ‘the morbid and the ...”