“... governance. Royal intimacy might have been delicious and intoxicating, but it came with real power.Francis Bacon – who had known a few favourites and was himself a favourite of Buckingham’s – knew it was an office to be discharged carefully. ‘You are his shadow,’ he warned Buckingham, and since ‘the king himself is above the reach of his ...”

“... like Madame de Pompadour but she lacked her purpose and personal influence. Pamela was drawn to power itself, rather than what power could achieve, and had no developed politics of her own. She could easily have been a Republican, if she had married one. She operated through the men she consorted with, acquired their ...”

“... influencing Marx’s and Engels’s ideas in various ways. By far the most important was Lewis Henry Morgan’s Ancient Society, published in 1877. Morgan’s general evolutionary conception was in some respects strikingly similar to the historical materialism of the German Ideology. And it contained one specific feature which attracted Marx’s and ...”

“... that archetypal new man and adoptive Londoner, hardly a reassuring figure to the landed gentry, Henry Brougham. But Rupke wants to do more than illustrate useful truisms about the local fostering of intellectual traditions or clashes of generations and networks in the history of science. He probes the psyche. Admitting that the London scientists were ...”

“... emotions and, especially, partings. ‘Arabella Stuart’ tells the story of the descendant of Henry VII, forcibly separated from her husband, William Seymour, because of both parties’ threatening proximity to the throne. Hemans has Lady Arabella imprisoned and hallucinating, and what is remarkable in the poem is the way in which dreaming, remembering ...”

“... and wet and inaccessible, but as Munro describes it the valley begins to take on a mysterious power, precisely in its poverty and inaccessibility, conferring all kinds of advantages on those who belong to it. Shepherds were supposed to have hunted down and murdered Merlin in these woods; the valley was home to Michael Scott, a wizard who appears in ...”

“... meekness, tendresse, womanliness, the glowing, melting sentiments, while David Hume, Adam Smith, Henry Mackenzie and James Macpherson weighed in from North of the border. The Irish were never just gorillas with gelignite. Those Irish historians who play down the anti-Irishness of the British for their own political ends are right to that extent. It would be ...”

“... In​ the preface to The Ambassadors written for the New York Edition of 1909, Henry James insisted that although the conception of the novel required that the unfolding action be in some sense seen through Strether’s eyes, there had been no question of using first-person narration. That technique, he insisted, would have been too self-indulgent: his treatment of Strether had ‘to keep in view proprieties much stiffer and more salutary’ that ‘forbid the terrible fluidity of self-revelation ...”

“... more formidable critic of the state of the Church, among other things in his realisation of the power of the vernacular. All Erasmus’s writings were in Latin. In 1521, Luther’s books were publicly burned as heretical. Erasmus was moved to protest: you could, he warned the Church, make bonfires of books, or even of men, but this was no cure for your own ...”

“... man is less known. Mandela was born the son of Nosekeni, one of the four wives of a Tembu chief, Henry Gadla. He lived in Nosekeni’s hut, sleeping on mats, eating mealie meal and playing in the dust like any other little African country boy. He cannot have seen his father much, since Henry Gadla had to divide his time ...”

“... whirling before she was born. Probably, her real father was the angelically handsome seducer Henry Cust, who played tennis in the nude. Her mother, Violet, Duchess of Rutland, sculpted so well that Rodin compared her with Donatello. Watts said she drew like Holbein. But the first thing to say about Violet was that she was supremely beautiful. (Had she ...”

“... having been wrecked and remade, is like the journey of many apprentice rulers in Shakespeare – Henry IV, Prince Hal becoming Henry V, Richard II in his fruitful desolation. But here the personal is inseparable from the public, and from the cosmic: in The Mahabharata, the Great Chain of Being has the limitless ...”

“... of words and things and half-grasped insights – soon after, I had the same experience with Henry James’s What Maisie Knew, chosen because of the Degas on the cover – seems to me the pattern of most readerly initiations. We aren’t drawn in by the argument, or what’s said or shown. Rather something feels right, smells right, in the colour and ...”

“... imperial past. ‘To delight in the aspects of sentient ruin might appear a heartless pastime,’ Henry James commented, ‘and the pleasure, I confess, shows a note of perversity.’ Nathaniel Hawthorne was equally complacent: ‘The final charm,’ he wrote, ‘is bestowed by the malaria . . . For if you . . . stray through these glades in the golden ...”

“... written the fiction his criticism desires. A list of the weaknesses of English fiction since, say, Henry Green would go like this: it has produced few characters of depth or life (only Mr Biswas, Jean Brodie and John Self in almost forty years); it has been grossly, childishly explicit with symbol and allegory (Golding, Carter); the freedom of its characters ...”