“... tautly muscled body, and the benignly smiling head of a thick-bearded man. In the opinion of Henry Layard, the excavator of Nineveh, the beauty of the palace carvings showed a ‘spirit and truthfulness worthy of a Greek artist’. In 1853 there was no higher praise. Michael Rakowitz, ‘The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist’ Layard quickly ...”

“... the moral ambitions it represented. This branch-to-branch search is centred on John Stuart Mill, Henry Fawcett and Leslie Stephen. He then traces the change in style and tone which came as the academic profession and the public service spread their tentacles. He discusses three legal theorists who epitomised this transition – ...”

“... to be too afraid of pleasure. There are other hobby-horses, such as the pernicious influence of Henry James upon English fiction. James sinned by turning the eyes of the best authors ‘away from the needs, passions and immortal longings of humanity to dwell on the trivial curiosities of sheltered gentlefolk’, on ‘little social problems of no real ...”

“... an extraordinary – and extraordinarily interesting – book, a model of intellectual biography. Henry Sidgwick’s day job was Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge. He is today best known as the author of Methods of Ethics, a work that philosophers still mine, and the model for modern masterpieces such as John Rawls’s Theory of Justice and ...”

“... Pierpont Morgan has never said “I” in his life.’ Strouse would agree. ‘He was, as Henry Adams said of Theodore Roosevelt, “pure act”.’ But Schlegel goes on to say, ‘if you could pierce through him, you’d find panic and emptiness in the middle’, which Strouse wouldn’t say of Morgan. He may lack any very complicated internal ...”

“... but ecumenical bric-à-brac shrines. One from 1965 named Prell after its central component, a very green shampoo, was well described by James Schuyler: A dozen bottles of Prell – that insidious green – terrible green roses and grapes, glass dangles like emeralds, long strings of ...”

“... those who, like me, brought up on Arthur Machen, John Buchan, Rosemary Sutcliff, Mary Renault and Henry Treece, not to mention H.P. Lovecraft, got the wrong idea a long time ago and have been reluctant to abandon it. The wrong idea is the ‘widely held belief that the ancient pre-Christian religions of Europe … had in some form and by some definition ...”

“... its medieval layout. It’s not hard to notice the absence at the heart of the town, a great green open space once occupied by a massive Benedictine abbey. Little of it is left: the remains of two monumental entrance gates plus a lofty detached bell tower, the latter dwarfing the two parish churches that once respectfully flanked an abbey church as large ...”

“... for a walk along the local beach or by taking minor trips or otherwise agreeable spells abroad: Henry James in France, D.H. Lawrence in New Mexico, Lawrence Durrell in Corfu, Michel Butor in Istanbul, Henry Miller in Greece. In December 1933, leaving his father in Simla and his mother in London, Patrick Leigh Fermor set ...”

“... is kept from wreaking havoc by a spell of bondage only Titania can break. The mortals – Molly, Henry and Will – are recovering from losses (a boyfriend’s suicide for Molly; a cruel break-up for Henry; a fateful sexual indiscretion for Will) which they hope the party will salve. But they never make ...”

“... by varnish was now visible in the painting’s upper left corner, peeking out from behind the green curtain. Newly revealed, too, were the formerly illegible words, in German, on the pages of the open hymnal.It requires an effort today – when high-resolution, colour images of famous artworks are readily available at the click of a mouse – to imagine ...”

“... lied Who spoke of the painful and most Embarrassing ordeal this side Satisfaction, – while the green Difficulties later are More than Zeus could bear. Apparently the ‘ordeal’ here is unrequited love, and the ‘difficulties’ are sexual jealousy: Berryman’s ‘Note on Poetry’ (appended to his ‘Twenty Poems’ in Five Young American ...”

“... of Poetry, later published in Instead of a Shrine (2019), she addresses the idea of ritual in Henry King’s ‘Exequy’, an elegy for his wife that begins ‘Accept, thou shrine of my dead saint,/ Instead of Dirges this complaint.’ Of these twelve words, three sound a risky Catholic note for a poet who had suffered persecution during the Civil ...”

“... simpler sense. The Return of the Soldier takes place in ancestral Baldry Court, perfect in its ‘green pleasantness’, except that the post arrives too late to be brought up with the morning tea. Parthenope is set in Currivel Lodge with its haunted croquet lawn. The character of Nikolai in The birds fall down was based on a Russian tutor – though he has ...”

“... that, in its essentials, it held the floor until the late 19th century. Writing in 1873, J.R. Green was doing little more than epitomise it when he ascribed to Richard ‘fitful inconstancy, an insane pride, and a craving for absolute power’. The first wave of professional academic historians, notably William Stubbs and his pupil T.F. Tout, did much to ...”